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Big news outlets stupidly sold their soul to Facebook. Desperate for the referral traffic Facebook dangled, they spent the past few years jumping through its hoops only to be cut out of the equation. Instead of developing an owned audience of homepage visitors and newsletter subscribers, they let Facebook brainwash readers into thinking it was their source of information.
Now Facebook is pushing into local news, but publishers should be wary of making the same crooked deal. It might provide more exposure and traffic for smaller outlets today, but it could teach users they only need to visit Facebook for local news in the future. Here's how Facebook retrained us over the past 12 years to drain the dollars out of news.
Source : How Facebook stole the news business
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @01:08AM (1 child)
If I was a billionaire media mogul, I'd probably be thinking about buying Twitter. Seems like a good platform to start building a premium news feed on top of and integrate even more with the core Twitter functionality to share reactions. Reactions pointing to premium content could have some sort of visual indicator setting them apart, hopefully reeling in more subscribers. Seems like something that could work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @05:18AM
Already happened:
https://qz.com/519388/this-saudi-prince-now-owns-more-of-twitter-than-jack-dorsey-does/ [qz.com]
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/saudi-prince-invests-300-million-in-twitter/ [nytimes.com]
and you know what that is about.
Twitter could easily be dismissed for the garbage it is except for the unpleasant fact that most news services scrounge through it these days instead of doing reporting. So for a topic to get to your screen, you have to be interested enough to click on it, but first a pseudo-reporter has to find it interesting and matching the agenda of their employer, but before all that it has to pass the ideology and agenda of the major Twitter investors. That's a lot of filtering happening before you even start reading.
So next time you see an article built of pasted together "Tweets" or built around some vague mentions of what some "reporter" claims to have read on Twitter, recall that series of filters and have a care about what it might be straining out of even your Mainstream Media news feeds.