37 ms·

Social media's effect on journalism is greater than shift from print to digital

144 points by ptrptr 10y ago

Lxr 10y ago
More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay with our attention and our data rather than our money.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Page-views has always been the priority even for print media. In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through. The only thing different now is the scale.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    The sensational headlines of pre-radio print, yes, today's clickbait isn't half as fresh as we like to think. But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      Yes, good points about the very low barriers to entry and virulence. I'm not sure I've seen the word virulence used in reference to the internet term viral, but it sure does seem fitting. It certainly does seem that with every new technological advance we create new ways to do amazing things both good and bad.
- makomk 10y ago
  It probably doesn't help that journalists think they can literally just make shit up on Twitter because journalistic standards don't apply there, and it then spreads virally due to their reputation and other journalists retweeting it. It's even more unlikely people will see any corrections on social media too.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Maybe "journalists" isn't the right word for them. It's closer to "comedians", I think. But there's a twisted way how lies can be tacitly acknowledged as lies. And yet considered truth. Not in a factual sense, but metaphorically, with a wink and a nod. In a word, lulz.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  > shift in journalism from reporting facts Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.
  - carlmungz 10y ago
    Depending on the subject matter, you're more likely to get more objective reporting from local/regional press than nationals because local journalists tend to live in the area they're covering, so it's in their best interests to be straight with their reporting.
    - uncletaco 9y ago
      So you're saying we're likely to get more objective coverage from people who are more invested in the community in question? If a local journalist writes an unflattering story about new zoning laws taking place in her city, zoning laws that will send her child to another elementary school where the children do not score as high on standardized tests, would you assume she's more objective? When a local journalist writes positively about a highway extension that's going to level a "bad" neighborhood but make it easier for him to commute back and forth to his office downtown, would you not question his impartiality? In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
      - carlmungz 9y ago
        I guess I was talking more from my experience as a local reporter for four years in the UK. If I had developed a reputation for being unfair and unbalanced, no sources would have spoken to me or given me useful inside knowledge. The same principle is true to national and international press but being geographically confined to a particular area in my experience helps to focus the mind more. At least in my case it made want to take extra steps when possible to make sure I covered all angles and different viewpoints.
- matt4077 10y ago
  The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong. There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy. Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism. Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process. In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Never underestimate the ability of people to romanticise a past that never existed.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Try reading actual newspaper archives from the 80's or 50's. The real difference is manpower -> investigations. Small town corruption investigations where somewhat common, but we don't have nearly the news independent coverage which suggests people are simply getting away with more corruption.
  - marincounty 10y ago
    "The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong" 1. I don't want to get into a debate, but don't you think a serious lack of money affects journalism? 2. In the past, the big newspapers could pay for due diligence. The best reporters rose to the top, and built a reputation on honestly/ethics. 3. Now--with their shoe strong budgets, the news stories seem thrown together, and all of us here, usually pick them apart piece by piece. 4. I'm not claiming that a certain generation had more ethics than another, but it's just a matter of economics. If you don't have money to hire talent, you hire whomever is willing to work. 5. A few days ago, someone said The Economist has a lot of annoymous articles. Why?
- pixelmonkey 10y ago
  Tim Wu wrote an entire book called "The Attention Merchants" documenting the long history (going back to the 1800s) of various forms of media being commercialized with attention and data. The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution. What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization. I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web. I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz http://amzn.to/2osFiNz
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Thanks. Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?
    - pixelmonkey 10y ago
      I haven't come across anything that is like a "history textbook of marketing", but would be glad to read something like that one day. I am sure something similar must show up in marketing/communications/journalism graduate schools.
      - 10y ago
- dragontamer 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism > The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.
_rpd 10y ago
> Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target content. They have not wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both cost and the perception that humans would be biased. However, the nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach. Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power. Could they develop this without splitting into Blue Facebook and Red Facebook like the television news networks?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  They already have though. My friends seem to draw political posts in their feeds from two different pools, depending on the user's affiliation.
  - _rpd 10y ago
    Interesting. I wonder if they maintain two different editorial teams.
    - mehaveaccount 10y ago
      I don't think so. I had to purposefully subscribe to far right news sources and block a lot of mainstream media outlets in order to see much right-wing news in my Facebook feed. That trending news feed is still biased left though, I can't change that.
    - bebopfunk 9y ago
      You may find this graphical representation of the differences between facebook news feeds interesting if you have not already seen it. http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      They don't. In fact, as a response to the "fake news" hysteria, they've gone to a completely centralized "Trending News" bar, so it's identical across the country. [0] This is after they got in trouble last year for intentionally stopping the propagation of stories that painted conservatives positively. [1] [0] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-to-trending/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-... [1] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
golergka 10y ago
Why are people saying that social media is the problem? As far as I see, social media are just more effective at satisfying people's wants in their information consumption. It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes their echo chamber.
- mirimir 10y ago
  It's because social media can deliver bullshit in a highly specific and targeted way. Only so many cable channels are possible.
  - golergka 10y ago
    It can deliver anything in a highly specific and targeted way. It delivers bullshit because that's what people want the most.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      True. Inexorably, you get what you select for.
      - amelius 10y ago
        The real questions are therefore: how can we educate those people or how can we remove them from the voting pool?
        golergka 10y ago
        If you consider yourself not to be one of "those people", you're being very optimistic.
        mirimir 10y ago
        Well, self-awareness is the first step ;)
        10y ago
debt 10y ago
"Social media" calls into question the entire current consumer tech landscape. What's the point of being always connected if the things we have access to or are connected to is garbage?
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Past Futurists where right, but for the wrong reasons, when they said that in the future the most valuable resources will be our garbage. Facebook has a market cap that dwarfs what it cost to put the Philae lander on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
- Mahn 10y ago
  To be perfectly blunt though, social media is just a medium, what is garbage is what people are putting it in there. Being always connected just amplifies what was already there. So, I would argue that what social media really calls into question is our very society.
rustynails77 10y ago
I found some of the comments in this article highly insightful and others surprisingly blinkered. It did an excellent job of tying in technology and the media, however, the presentation left much to be desired. For example, Q: How many people trust Facebook as a news source and/or don't check any other sources? Q: Why was there no mention of TV and radio news? Q: Why did the article imply many times that Trump only won the election because of fake news on Facebook, yet, embedded well down was the comment '“overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.” This is almost certainly true.' Q: Why does the article imply multiple times that Facebook is the principal source of fake news, when a Google search of keywords can prove most media outlets (including the prestige NYT) propagate fake news? This was not spelt out nearly clearly enough. All media outlets have some form of bias. However, the reason that most people i've spoken with are wary of Facebook news is because it only shows you what you want to hear. You can't establish an informed judgement with that sort of information. Long term, I believe this will be the downfall of Facebook as it will never be seen as a credible news source. It will allow its readers to be blind-sided (ie. like the people who predicted the election result to be a landslide in favour of Hillary Clinton). After reading this article, I have a better appreciation of why so many people struggle with critical thinking. For example, anyone that says "domestic violence is not exclusively a male behaviour" (even when you list the high percentage of male victims) is shouted down as an extreme right winger. This defines logic, but, it's an extremely popular and pervasive view throughout the mainstream media of all western countries and is almost never challenged, despite obvious ethical implications. It's an excellent illustration of blind-siding and an inability to critically think or fact check by most media outlets. The New York Times a great example of prejudice of mainstream media because it's often quoted as exemplary media. Look at the following NYT times page on hiring a gender editor. Not only is it extremely biased and inflammatory, but it specifically spells out the sort of editor and the sort of prejudices the NYT are looking for. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/jobs/nyt-gender-editor.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/jobs/nyt-gender-edi... "An analysis that shows how pay decreases when women take over jobs that men used to dominate. A look at how women ruled the Olympics. A searing documentary showing how a mob in Afghanistan killed an innocent woman. Chronicling the quest of women in rural India to work and be independent, even at the cost of their lives..." The same page has the cheek to claim they are equal opportunity and non-discriminatory. That takes real courage (or a head in the sand). women "ruled" the Olympics? If someone said "men ruled the Olympics", you'd have extensive outrage over social media, if not more. In summary, the article has some excellent insights and fundamental flaws (eg. news on radio and TV not mentioned; Is Facebook really treated credibly?). It also didn't address the credibility and usefulness of news sources that tailor content rather than telling the whole truth. It downplayed the amount of "fake news" that comes from the mainstream media and misrepresented what influenced the outcome of the election.
losteverything 10y ago
Report is by a journalism school. Their ecosystem has always believed they are more important than they are. A person can earn a living within their ecosystem and never leave it. This report is an example of how their ecosystem thrives on talking about their ecosystem. Yet I remain even more certain we are much better off now than the Cronkite days when it was 3 networks, a few newspapers and national enquirer.
- ForRealsies 10y ago
  Journalists in large media markets (NYC, DC, etc.) can literally not make a living with their paltry salaries. It necessitates that they come from rich families (ex: Anderson Cooper) to be supported. It is classism. The middle class choose to become doctors/engineers instead.
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Help me understand this If I am a peraon who writes words that get published, at the daily news or NYT for example, I get paid, right? How much? 50k a year? Or are some of the words published written by someone else not in their payroll.
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops. There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much. Most "journalists" today are starving artist types. I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet, we all have direct access to the news. We're no longer dependent on someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do that ourselves with aggregation platforms. The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable career.
hectorr 10y ago
This makes sense. Social companies now own eyeballs. They sell eyeballs to advertisers, something legacy media used to do. But legacy media didn't own eyeballs through the magic of journalism, it owned them through massive monopolies in print (local) and telecom (national). Journalists don't like to talk about this, because it hurts their ego.
rpazyaquian 10y ago
Pretty sure the latter was necessary for the former.
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
Social media cuts out the journalist middleman and makes everyone a broadcasting journalist. Print journalism was (relatively) one to many. Social media is many to many.
- pdelbarba 10y ago
  It does, but at the same time also cuts out whatever was left of journalistic ethics as well.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Perhaps, though it seems corporate profits have been prioritized over journalistic ethics in the mass media since at least the 1890s with the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer.
sbardle 10y ago
In the seventeenth century, media shifted from manuscripts to print. Now print has shifted to digital, but with the rise of Social some of the earlier dynamics of manuscript circulation are coming back into play, e.g "scribal communities" can be compared with "social media communities". What this means, I've no idea, but it could lead to a further polarising of political opinion as social media communities solidify and cross-community dialogue disappears.
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
Back in the day we used to call this "web 2.0"
ThomPete 9y ago
The only thing that changed was the readers illusion of newspapers somehow being the source of truth and objecticity. People used to believe that journalism was about reporing facts and objective accounts of what was going on. In reality the newspapers who used to position themselves as objective never where, they were however mainstream. Thanks to the internet people are now seeing the reality of journalism which is that there are many different perspectives on any subject or put another way. The post-modernists were right all along. Journalism has never been as factual as it is today it's just that people are uneasy about the reality that different facts can be used to create different angels to the same story. The only piece of objectivity there is in any story is the event itself. "Plane went down", "Man committed of murder", "Trump won the presidency" once you step outside of these basic facts it's mostly up to interpretation. The whys, the hows, all based on interpretation. Thanks to social media and then fact that you can't just get away with claiming one interpretation when there are more is what make social media disruptive, not to journalism but to the way we understand journalism.

144 points by ptrptr 10y ago

Lxr 10y ago

More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay with our attention and our data rather than our money.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Page-views has always been the priority even for print media. In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through. The only thing different now is the scale.
- usrusr 10y ago
  The sensational headlines of pre-radio print, yes, today's clickbait isn't half as fresh as we like to think. But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Yes, good points about the very low barriers to entry and virulence. I'm not sure I've seen the word virulence used in reference to the internet term viral, but it sure does seem fitting. It certainly does seem that with every new technological advance we create new ways to do amazing things both good and bad.
makomk 10y ago
It probably doesn't help that journalists think they can literally just make shit up on Twitter because journalistic standards don't apply there, and it then spreads virally due to their reputation and other journalists retweeting it. It's even more unlikely people will see any corrections on social media too.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Maybe "journalists" isn't the right word for them. It's closer to "comedians", I think. But there's a twisted way how lies can be tacitly acknowledged as lies. And yet considered truth. Not in a factual sense, but metaphorically, with a wink and a nod. In a word, lulz.
ekianjo 10y ago
> shift in journalism from reporting facts Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.
- carlmungz 10y ago
  Depending on the subject matter, you're more likely to get more objective reporting from local/regional press than nationals because local journalists tend to live in the area they're covering, so it's in their best interests to be straight with their reporting.
  - uncletaco 9y ago
    So you're saying we're likely to get more objective coverage from people who are more invested in the community in question? If a local journalist writes an unflattering story about new zoning laws taking place in her city, zoning laws that will send her child to another elementary school where the children do not score as high on standardized tests, would you assume she's more objective? When a local journalist writes positively about a highway extension that's going to level a "bad" neighborhood but make it easier for him to commute back and forth to his office downtown, would you not question his impartiality? In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
    - carlmungz 9y ago
      I guess I was talking more from my experience as a local reporter for four years in the UK. If I had developed a reputation for being unfair and unbalanced, no sources would have spoken to me or given me useful inside knowledge. The same principle is true to national and international press but being geographically confined to a particular area in my experience helps to focus the mind more. At least in my case it made want to take extra steps when possible to make sure I covered all angles and different viewpoints.
matt4077 10y ago
The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong. There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy. Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism. Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process. In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Never underestimate the ability of people to romanticise a past that never existed.
- Retric 10y ago
  Try reading actual newspaper archives from the 80's or 50's. The real difference is manpower -> investigations. Small town corruption investigations where somewhat common, but we don't have nearly the news independent coverage which suggests people are simply getting away with more corruption.
- marincounty 10y ago
  "The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong" 1. I don't want to get into a debate, but don't you think a serious lack of money affects journalism? 2. In the past, the big newspapers could pay for due diligence. The best reporters rose to the top, and built a reputation on honestly/ethics. 3. Now--with their shoe strong budgets, the news stories seem thrown together, and all of us here, usually pick them apart piece by piece. 4. I'm not claiming that a certain generation had more ethics than another, but it's just a matter of economics. If you don't have money to hire talent, you hire whomever is willing to work. 5. A few days ago, someone said The Economist has a lot of annoymous articles. Why?
pixelmonkey 10y ago
Tim Wu wrote an entire book called "The Attention Merchants" documenting the long history (going back to the 1800s) of various forms of media being commercialized with attention and data. The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution. What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing. NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization. I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web. I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz http://amzn.to/2osFiNz
- losteverything 10y ago
  Thanks. Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?
  - pixelmonkey 10y ago
    I haven't come across anything that is like a "history textbook of marketing", but would be glad to read something like that one day. I am sure something similar must show up in marketing/communications/journalism graduate schools.
    - 10y ago
dragontamer 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism > The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.

_rpd 10y ago

> Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target content. They have not wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both cost and the perception that humans would be biased. However, the nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach. Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power. Could they develop this without splitting into Blue Facebook and Red Facebook like the television news networks?

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
They already have though. My friends seem to draw political posts in their feeds from two different pools, depending on the user's affiliation.
- _rpd 10y ago
  Interesting. I wonder if they maintain two different editorial teams.
  - mehaveaccount 10y ago
    I don't think so. I had to purposefully subscribe to far right news sources and block a lot of mainstream media outlets in order to see much right-wing news in my Facebook feed. That trending news feed is still biased left though, I can't change that.
  - bebopfunk 9y ago
    You may find this graphical representation of the differences between facebook news feeds interesting if you have not already seen it. http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    They don't. In fact, as a response to the "fake news" hysteria, they've gone to a completely centralized "Trending News" bar, so it's identical across the country. [0] This is after they got in trouble last year for intentionally stopping the propagation of stories that painted conservatives positively. [1] [0] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-to-trending/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-... [1] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

golergka 10y ago

Why are people saying that social media is the problem? As far as I see, social media are just more effective at satisfying people's wants in their information consumption. It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes their echo chamber.

mirimir 10y ago
It's because social media can deliver bullshit in a highly specific and targeted way. Only so many cable channels are possible.
- golergka 10y ago
  It can deliver anything in a highly specific and targeted way. It delivers bullshit because that's what people want the most.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    True. Inexorably, you get what you select for.
    - amelius 10y ago
      The real questions are therefore: how can we educate those people or how can we remove them from the voting pool?
      - golergka 10y ago
        If you consider yourself not to be one of "those people", you're being very optimistic.
        mirimir 10y ago
        Well, self-awareness is the first step ;)
      - 10y ago

debt 10y ago

"Social media" calls into question the entire current consumer tech landscape. What's the point of being always connected if the things we have access to or are connected to is garbage?

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Past Futurists where right, but for the wrong reasons, when they said that in the future the most valuable resources will be our garbage. Facebook has a market cap that dwarfs what it cost to put the Philae lander on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Mahn 10y ago
To be perfectly blunt though, social media is just a medium, what is garbage is what people are putting it in there. Being always connected just amplifies what was already there. So, I would argue that what social media really calls into question is our very society.

rustynails77 10y ago

I found some of the comments in this article highly insightful and others surprisingly blinkered. It did an excellent job of tying in technology and the media, however, the presentation left much to be desired. For example, Q: How many people trust Facebook as a news source and/or don't check any other sources? Q: Why was there no mention of TV and radio news? Q: Why did the article imply many times that Trump only won the election because of fake news on Facebook, yet, embedded well down was the comment '“overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.” This is almost certainly true.' Q: Why does the article imply multiple times that Facebook is the principal source of fake news, when a Google search of keywords can prove most media outlets (including the prestige NYT) propagate fake news? This was not spelt out nearly clearly enough. All media outlets have some form of bias. However, the reason that most people i've spoken with are wary of Facebook news is because it only shows you what you want to hear. You can't establish an informed judgement with that sort of information. Long term, I believe this will be the downfall of Facebook as it will never be seen as a credible news source. It will allow its readers to be blind-sided (ie. like the people who predicted the election result to be a landslide in favour of Hillary Clinton). After reading this article, I have a better appreciation of why so many people struggle with critical thinking. For example, anyone that says "domestic violence is not exclusively a male behaviour" (even when you list the high percentage of male victims) is shouted down as an extreme right winger. This defines logic, but, it's an extremely popular and pervasive view throughout the mainstream media of all western countries and is almost never challenged, despite obvious ethical implications. It's an excellent illustration of blind-siding and an inability to critically think or fact check by most media outlets. The New York Times a great example of prejudice of mainstream media because it's often quoted as exemplary media. Look at the following NYT times page on hiring a gender editor. Not only is it extremely biased and inflammatory, but it specifically spells out the sort of editor and the sort of prejudices the NYT are looking for. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/jobs/nyt-gender-editor.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/jobs/nyt-gender-edi... "An analysis that shows how pay decreases when women take over jobs that men used to dominate. A look at how women ruled the Olympics. A searing documentary showing how a mob in Afghanistan killed an innocent woman. Chronicling the quest of women in rural India to work and be independent, even at the cost of their lives..." The same page has the cheek to claim they are equal opportunity and non-discriminatory. That takes real courage (or a head in the sand). women "ruled" the Olympics? If someone said "men ruled the Olympics", you'd have extensive outrage over social media, if not more. In summary, the article has some excellent insights and fundamental flaws (eg. news on radio and TV not mentioned; Is Facebook really treated credibly?). It also didn't address the credibility and usefulness of news sources that tailor content rather than telling the whole truth. It downplayed the amount of "fake news" that comes from the mainstream media and misrepresented what influenced the outcome of the election.

losteverything 10y ago

Report is by a journalism school. Their ecosystem has always believed they are more important than they are. A person can earn a living within their ecosystem and never leave it. This report is an example of how their ecosystem thrives on talking about their ecosystem. Yet I remain even more certain we are much better off now than the Cronkite days when it was 3 networks, a few newspapers and national enquirer.

ForRealsies 10y ago
Journalists in large media markets (NYC, DC, etc.) can literally not make a living with their paltry salaries. It necessitates that they come from rich families (ex: Anderson Cooper) to be supported. It is classism. The middle class choose to become doctors/engineers instead.
- losteverything 10y ago
  Help me understand this If I am a peraon who writes words that get published, at the daily news or NYT for example, I get paid, right? How much? 50k a year? Or are some of the words published written by someone else not in their payroll.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops. There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much. Most "journalists" today are starving artist types. I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet, we all have direct access to the news. We're no longer dependent on someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do that ourselves with aggregation platforms. The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable career.

hectorr 10y ago

This makes sense. Social companies now own eyeballs. They sell eyeballs to advertisers, something legacy media used to do. But legacy media didn't own eyeballs through the magic of journalism, it owned them through massive monopolies in print (local) and telecom (national). Journalists don't like to talk about this, because it hurts their ego.

rpazyaquian 10y ago

Pretty sure the latter was necessary for the former.

wu-ikkyu 10y ago

Social media cuts out the journalist middleman and makes everyone a broadcasting journalist. Print journalism was (relatively) one to many. Social media is many to many.

pdelbarba 10y ago
It does, but at the same time also cuts out whatever was left of journalistic ethics as well.
- deleted 9y ago
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- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Perhaps, though it seems corporate profits have been prioritized over journalistic ethics in the mass media since at least the 1890s with the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer.

sbardle 10y ago

In the seventeenth century, media shifted from manuscripts to print. Now print has shifted to digital, but with the rise of Social some of the earlier dynamics of manuscript circulation are coming back into play, e.g "scribal communities" can be compared with "social media communities". What this means, I've no idea, but it could lead to a further polarising of political opinion as social media communities solidify and cross-community dialogue disappears.

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

Back in the day we used to call this "web 2.0"

ThomPete 9y ago

The only thing that changed was the readers illusion of newspapers somehow being the source of truth and objecticity. People used to believe that journalism was about reporing facts and objective accounts of what was going on. In reality the newspapers who used to position themselves as objective never where, they were however mainstream. Thanks to the internet people are now seeing the reality of journalism which is that there are many different perspectives on any subject or put another way. The post-modernists were right all along. Journalism has never been as factual as it is today it's just that people are uneasy about the reality that different facts can be used to create different angels to the same story. The only piece of objectivity there is in any story is the event itself. "Plane went down", "Man committed of murder", "Trump won the presidency" once you step outside of these basic facts it's mostly up to interpretation. The whys, the hows, all based on interpretation. Thanks to social media and then fact that you can't just get away with claiming one interpretation when there are more is what make social media disruptive, not to journalism but to the way we understand journalism.