From Motherboard, Jan. 11:
A society that relies on a centralized portal to get its news may very well be doomed.
Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times
that the social network will revamp its news feed to emphasize
“meaningful interaction” between friends and family. As a result, the
news feed will significantly decrease the number of posts you’ll see
from news outlets such as Motherboard.
Good.
This move
has been long-rumored, and has been looked at by many in the industry as
an incoming algorithmic apocalypse that will have far-reaching impacts
on the bottom lines and ultimate survival of outlets whose readers find
them through Facebook. But my hope is that we’ll come out of this with a
healthier news media.
For the last few years, the articles much of the news industry
publishes—and even the formats they publish in—have been dictated by the
whims of a tech giant that seems to have more interest in experimenting
with its algorithm than serving its own users, let alone the readers of
third party media companies. As advertisers left traditional media
companies for the promise of targeted ads on Facebook (and Google), news outlets were forced to align themselves closely with their biggest existential threat.
Entire
business models have risen and fallen with Facebook’s tweaks to its
opaque algorithm: First, companies chased Facebook virality, regardless
of the content of their articles; then, they made videos specifically to
chase engagement on Facebook’s newsfeed; then, Facebook prioritized live videos, which, in one case led to a Washington Post journalist literally eating his newspaper article on camera (later, the company would pay media companies to make these videos, a program it quickly dropped).
Serious reporting and journalism became “content” subject to A/B
testing and paid promotion. Small changes to the news feed would make
the views on our articles rise and fall; analytics experts in the
industry would ask other outlets: “Is everyone getting screwed by
Facebook, or just us?”
In the end, Facebook didn’t care about
media companies.....MORE
