Imagine You Wanted To Destroy Journalism And Get Rich Doing It

From Quillette:

"Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the Internet. It simply
doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other
“content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for—directly or indirectly—by corporations who 

are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on
its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get… well, what we get. And it’s getting worse."
 ~Evan Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter

Journalism’s Death by a Thousand Tweets

Imagine you want to create a digital platform that will both destroy—or, at the very least, seriously enfeeble—the journalism profession, and simultaneously make you a vast amount of money. How should you do it?

Well, first you should ensure that the primary goal of your platform has absolutely nothing to do with the stated goals of the journalism profession. More specifically, the aim of your platform should not be to hold the powerful to account or, more broadly, to report on stories that are in the public interest. Rather, the platform’s main objective should ideally be the opposite of this: It should be to service the aims of powerful and private interests. The most obvious way to do this—whilst simultaneously making a lot of money—would be to sell millions and millions (and millions) of dollars’ worth of advertisements on behalf of these interests.

Then you should try to get as many journalists to use your platform as much as possible. (After all, what better way to destroy journalism than to get the vast majority of journalists to compulsively use a platform the aims of which are antithetical to those of their own profession?) The most straightforward way to do this would be to design a digital platform that is highly addictive (or, to use a less medically-loaded and industry-friendly term, “habit-forming”). To ensure that this platform is sufficiently habit-forming, it should conform to what author Nir Eyal has called the “hooking model,” to which every other major digital platform, consciously or unconsciously, scrupulously adheres. In particular, this platform should encourage or even require some kind of investment by its users (in the form of, for instance, content creation or profile curation). This habit-forming quality will have the further, collateral benefit of encouraging non-journalists to use it too—this is a very good thing, as it will allow you to sell targeted ads to them as well, and (hence) allow you to make even more money than you otherwise would. More importantly, it should feature variable rewards as one of the defining characteristics of its users’ platform experience (in the form of, say, a “newsfeed”).

....MUCH MORE

And we aren't even looking at Google and Facebook.
Although Google's Page and Brin are worth $100 billion between them, Zuckerberg's pile is that big all to himself.