The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism
This article by Adrienne Lafrance for The Atlantic may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
In other words, Facebook is building a global newsroom run by robot editors and its own readers.
This strategy may be right for Facebook, which has a strong track record of predicting what its users want. You certainly don’t rake in nearly $9 billion a quarter by building something people aren’t interested in. But if journalism is an indispensable component of the global community Zuckerberg is trying to build, he must also realize that what he’s building is a grave threat to journalism.
“A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community,” Zuckerberg wrote in his manifesto. “There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainable—from growing local news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the range of business models news organizations rely on.”
There is more Facebook must do. But what? Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it. All of this is the news industry’s problem; not Zuckerberg’s. But it’s also a problem for anyone who believes in and relies on quality journalism to make sense of the world.
I’ve been ruminating over the last couple of weeks on the role of journalism in modern society. This bell curve of where news organisations fall on the political spectrum is a testament to the tendency of journalists to write for well-defined demographics in service to the maxim “Give the people what they want”, or at least some of the people.
Taken from a wide angle, a profession that purports to hold truth sacred above everything else seems to tailor its version of the truth to whatever plays best with its desired audience. As a result conventional media organisations are very much at risk from a company like Facebook which has a loyalty to all its readers and is likely to feed whatever type of news they are interested in to them. That is also likely to increase demand for content and interesting viewpoints but probably not within the conventional newsroom. Bloggers and YouTubers could be the journalists of tomorrow.
Facebook remains in a consistent medium-term uptrend and has developed another short-term overbought condition relative to the trend mean. A sustained move below $125 would be required to begin to question medium-term scope for additional upside.