Journalism Must Skirt the Facebook Stranglehold
Amid the hubbub over the notorious echo chambers that Facebook’s algorithm generates in user news feeds, overlooked is a more consequential, hair-raising takeaway: Facebook and its competitors are swiftly replacing journalism as the gatekeepers of professional reporting standards. Already they yield immense power over how news is monetized and distributed to the public. Meanwhile, media organizations have caved to the trend of feeding news into social media platforms, effectively mutating into what the late media critic David Carr dubbed “serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.”
Media organizations ought to resist the temptation to rely on social platforms to distribute news. Instead, they should become pioneering service providers that ask consumers to pay for content again.
Professional journalism is an irreplaceable intermediary in representative democracy, an institution now under great pressure in both the United States and Europe, and therefore in vital need of a stalwart fourth estate. Without substantiated, practical information, produced by individuals chiefly animated to play watchdog, citizens are incapable of carrying out informed politics. Facts become relative. Climate change morphs into a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.
These days, news intake through mobile phones is rising, and more and more consumers inform themselves by way of social media news feeds; 44 percent of Americans go to Facebook for their news. Jazzed about reaching more consumers, and by extension earning the attendant ad revenue, publishers have been posting their work onto news-feed platforms managed by Facebook, Google, Apple, and the like. “The temptation for publishers to go ‘all in’ on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work on the social web, is getting stronger,” Emily Bell, of the Columbia Journalism School, has said. “I can imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity and even advertising departments and delegating it all to third party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.”
Swimming in submitted news stories – some legitimate, others bogus – the technology firms behind these distributed platforms take it upon themselves to channel information into user feeds using automated processes we know little about. In effect, media organizations – fallible, to be sure – have relinquished news judgment and responsible agenda-setting stewardship to a coterie whose central aim is not to foster an informed public as much as to attract billions of users to spaces that capitalize on their personal data, all the while bypassing the costs of producing quality journalism and the legal mechanisms of accountability that traditional media are expected to abide. Journalism should view these distributed platforms as a threat to its role as the arbiter of truth, and take steps to skirt a Facebook stranglehold.
Above all, publishers must reestablish news-consumer trust by forging relationships with them, an undertaking that entails interfacing with individuals on the ground, propagating knowledge practical to them, and convening people face to face, the last of which is an empirically proven method to reach consensus. For Jeff Jarvis, an expert in entrepreneurial journalism, media’s charge is to help a community “better organize its knowledge so it can better organize itself.” I view community in a broad sense, in that it can capture at once an entire profession or a neighborhood at the local level. It is at the local level in particular where news organizations have been gutted, which is why publishers, philanthropists, and policymakers should invest in a new generation of journalists stationed within cities and towns. Those who consume local news are more likely to vote and have stronger connections with their community.
The goal to be a service provider for consumers should guide decisions over how to rethink organizational structures and leverage technology, not least artificial intelligence, which gives journalists of all stripes – political, science, investigative, what have you, but all cheek-by-jowl with data scientists – the ability to corral their own data, make sense of it, and communicate it in ways that speak to audience desires. Imagine a system that can spot and dissect correlations in illness with location, income, race, gender, education, and other variables.
The fruits of that labor, however, cannot all be free on the internet. There is a deeply misguided assumption that popular social media services cost nothing. In point of fact, we pay dearly with our private data, which technology firms in turn monetize. If consumers will rapturously pay for Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services, surely they can be spurred to cough up for professional journalism too. The popularity of these media portfolios, says Tim Wu, of Columbia University, stems in part from an ongoing “revolt against major forms of advertising.” As they envisage new models for news production and distribution, publishers should heed the gathering popularity of ad blockers.
Professional journalism can develop its own go-to distribution platforms flowing with reliable knowledge, managed by responsible editors, and tailored to meet the needs of a target community. Research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review suggests that “content websites” can convert users into paying customers by gradually ramping up their social engagement. Depending on the target communities and themes, platforms could be subscription based, micropayment based, or even free, should they receive philanthropic funding to do investigative reporting, for example. In creating these systems, media organizations ought to distinguish themselves by championing online environments where consumers have privacy, and where they have the freedom to get all the information they want, when they want it; that is, to furnish an internet experience as decentralized as possible. This, as opposed to building so-called walled gardens that confine our movements online – spaces that technology firms are partial to.
Instead of letting technology companies corner the market on news distribution, journalism needs to blaze his own path. Nothing less than the integrity of liberal democracy is at stake.
