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This tells more about the journalists than Facebook. Facebook has always been the same. It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Furth

This tells more about the journalists than Facebook. Facebook has always been the same. It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. They have to write polarizing articles to gain more eyeballs since otherwise no one will have enough attention to read their articles. They should realize there's a bigger opportunity here but instead all they're focused on is short therm revenue and complaining about how Facebook (who focuses obsessively on long term value) is being unfair.

smadge 9y ago
The thing about rational actors is that their options are severely limited by the market. The publishers only choice is to follow the money and play the game or perish. And of corse complain about it.
- rtpg 9y ago
  I bet there are some good opportunties for some concentrated journalism that people will find interesting enough to build a "proper business" untainted by as much advertising. The success of patreon has me believe that you could probably get enough rich people to pay (say) $50/month for a news source that feels less of a need to pander. I don't want to be too dismissive, but even though I like the coverage I get from the NY Times, I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds, "Republicans place doubt on Hillary for X"-style both sides pieces, etc. I mean, sure, journalism. And its a big outfit, we don't all need to be writing about the opiod crisis. But I would like to think there's a market. Bonus points if you make this and get a rich person to help finance it. The subscription can help ease the losses whatever billionaire ends up taking. Medium is already kinda this.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    I agree with you on everything except for the part about "Medium is already kinda this". Medium has also made the same mistake of introducing bias even though they claim to want to become a platform. A lot of people see Medium as a place where a bunch of self-important people, wannabe activists, growth hackers, social justice warriors live. You can see that by the type of posts they promote on their main page as well as their official Twitter account. It's really hard to become unbiased when the organization has a clear owner. I am hoping that the new decentralized technologies will inspire some people to come up with a completely transparent and non biased system for true journalism.
    - rtpg 9y ago
      I don't really want an unbiased platform. I want a news source that accepts the postulates I accept. I don't want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy. I do want to read more things about labor issues, without the habitual "some people think that unions are actually bad!" stuff. I don't need the both sides fallacy, especially given the current state of politics. You wouldn't want to read a defense of homeopathy right? Why do I have to suffer through denial of climate change, defenses of trickle-down economics, or "increased economic growth will counterbalance the tax cuts!"?
      - zdkl 9y ago
        > I don't really want an unbiased platform. I want a news source that accepts the postulates I accept. And this is why we can't hve nice things. The argument here is that we generally don't want an echo chamber focused on one family of postulates and that by wishing for one, the end effect is the depreciation in social value of information sources. Think of it like genetics/evolution. You want a broad gene/information pool rather than an intellectually inbred circle-jerking cesspool circling the drain of attention at the expense of knowledge and education.
      - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
        No, in fact I do want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy. I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's. I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information. The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in. This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job. I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized. Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda. I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. That's certainly a problem with the media I'm familiar with, but it's all first-world western. Does the media in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia share those issues, in your experience? I'm assuming you read the article and are aware that those are the only countries currently affected?
Quanttek 9y ago
> This tells more about the journalists than Facebook. Facebook has always been the same. It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. I'm not sure what your whole screed about journaists has to do with the decision at hand. It's just a fact that one of the largest online audiences is on Facebook and that newspapers & magazines have to be present on that platform to get views. They can't really get around posting to Fb, can they? If Fb suddenly cuts a major source of revenue for a whole industry without any discussion, if that is Fb's power, then this is really unhealthy for our market economy and our ideas of democracy
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  The Web is an open platform. Facebook is not some big brother who has power to censor anything. People can type https://nytimes.com https://nytimes.com to go directly go to the new york times if they want. From Facebook's point of view, these media sites are nothing more than parasites that try to write sensational articles to mislead the public and get people to fight online. Users become unhappy because they get into unnecessary arguments with their friends and family about things that ultimately have no right or wrong answer (such as politics), and end up blaming Facebook for facilitating it. Facebook is unhappy because their users are unhappy. It's only these short-sighted media companies that "benefit" off of the traffic (but in the long term not so much). By cutting this party out of the equation, users are happier. Facebook is happier. And I would say it's a good thing even for the media because essentially they are being cut off of access to the race to the bottom that's killing them. One of the reasons why these publications had to write sensationalism articles and disseminate them onto Facebook was because if they didn't, their competition would. Now that they are cut off, they are forced to compete in healthier ways. It's kind of hilarious because it's like these self-important media companies are some kids trying to get their hands on a cookie jar and fighting, and one day their mom (Facebook) takes it all away so nobody gets the cookie jar. The kids cry and bitch about it saying it's not fair. But soon something great happens. kids no longer fight because there's nothing to fight over, but go out to earn their own cookie in their own creative ways. They may even share the ones they earned with one another if they're generous. Anyway this has nothing to do with democracy, they're just doing the thing they've become good at doing--spinning news to fit their interest--like kids crying and complaining about how it's not fair that the free cookie jar is gone.
pjc50 9y ago
> It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible. > It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?
- BayesStreet 9y ago
  Just because the pay is bad doesn't refute the point that they haven't sold their souls, it's a race to the bottom where selling out for terrible pay is preferable to having integrity for no pay.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  > Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible. I think I should have clarified. When I said "journalists", i used it in the same context as this article. Which means by "journalists" I meant "journalistic organisations". I have worked with and know many journalists who have high integrity. But at the end of the day it's the organization as a whole that decides what to focus on. So yeah, from my experience I'm pretty sure they all get into journalism because of their ideal and each journalist as an individual (especially those who work at those top newspapers) has high journalistic integrity, but my impression is that this spirit is dying away as new entrants see what's going on in the ecosystem. It's no secret that these media companies who pride themselves on having high bar for journalistic integrity have started pouring efforts to emulate Buzzfeed (and I'm not using Buzzfeed as symbolism, they have explicitly tried to study Buzzfeed and emulate it) > Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias? I think I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but I believe this is possible if you hire people from the both ends of the spectrum and write both points of view about the same story. This is impossible at the moment because the entire organization tends to consist of mostly left wing people or mostly right wing people, etc. It's a "company culture" thing, and you can't do this unless you change the company culture fundamentally.
detaro 9y ago
Kind of sad to see such a generic "journalism is bad!" rant with IMHO useless generalizations at the top of the comments here, instead of a discussion of the specific example. Yes, the relationship between Facebook and the media is problematic, but that doesn't mean every journalist using it "sold his soul" and that Facebook shouldn't be careful about how they experiment with changing this. I get cutting down on noise, but it sounds like they made following a page basically irrelevant (since the "explore" tab apparently has "recommended content it thinks you might find interesting, including posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed yet" (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/facebooks-discovery-focused-explore-feed-hits-the-desktop/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/facebooks-discovery-focuse... ). That sounds a bit much. Large media companies that "sold out" might be able to afford to promote some stories (which then will have to have a higher profit, pushing even more click-bait?), but for smaller actors as described in the article that seems unlikely. That kind of sounds like this move pushes what you dislike about "journalism" even more?
eighthnate 9y ago
> Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. Not only that. These same journalists are the ones demanding censorship of opposing views on FB and the rest of social media. All these selfish greedy journalists want is their own "fake news" making money on social media and other people's "fake news" banned. Frankly, I wish google, fb, twtr, etc would all band together and just ban all news from their platform for a week. Maybe that will quiet these useless journalists.

smadge 9y ago

The thing about rational actors is that their options are severely limited by the market. The publishers only choice is to follow the money and play the game or perish. And of corse complain about it.

rtpg 9y ago
I bet there are some good opportunties for some concentrated journalism that people will find interesting enough to build a "proper business" untainted by as much advertising. The success of patreon has me believe that you could probably get enough rich people to pay (say) $50/month for a news source that feels less of a need to pander. I don't want to be too dismissive, but even though I like the coverage I get from the NY Times, I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds, "Republicans place doubt on Hillary for X"-style both sides pieces, etc. I mean, sure, journalism. And its a big outfit, we don't all need to be writing about the opiod crisis. But I would like to think there's a market. Bonus points if you make this and get a rich person to help finance it. The subscription can help ease the losses whatever billionaire ends up taking. Medium is already kinda this.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I agree with you on everything except for the part about "Medium is already kinda this". Medium has also made the same mistake of introducing bias even though they claim to want to become a platform. A lot of people see Medium as a place where a bunch of self-important people, wannabe activists, growth hackers, social justice warriors live. You can see that by the type of posts they promote on their main page as well as their official Twitter account. It's really hard to become unbiased when the organization has a clear owner. I am hoping that the new decentralized technologies will inspire some people to come up with a completely transparent and non biased system for true journalism.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    I don't really want an unbiased platform. I want a news source that accepts the postulates I accept. I don't want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy. I do want to read more things about labor issues, without the habitual "some people think that unions are actually bad!" stuff. I don't need the both sides fallacy, especially given the current state of politics. You wouldn't want to read a defense of homeopathy right? Why do I have to suffer through denial of climate change, defenses of trickle-down economics, or "increased economic growth will counterbalance the tax cuts!"?
    - zdkl 9y ago
      > I don't really want an unbiased platform. I want a news source that accepts the postulates I accept. And this is why we can't hve nice things. The argument here is that we generally don't want an echo chamber focused on one family of postulates and that by wishing for one, the end effect is the depreciation in social value of information sources. Think of it like genetics/evolution. You want a broad gene/information pool rather than an intellectually inbred circle-jerking cesspool circling the drain of attention at the expense of knowledge and education.
    - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
      No, in fact I do want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy. I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's. I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information. The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in. This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job. I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized. Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda. I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

> Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. That's certainly a problem with the media I'm familiar with, but it's all first-world western. Does the media in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia share those issues, in your experience? I'm assuming you read the article and are aware that those are the only countries currently affected?

Quanttek 9y ago

> This tells more about the journalists than Facebook. Facebook has always been the same. It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. I'm not sure what your whole screed about journaists has to do with the decision at hand. It's just a fact that one of the largest online audiences is on Facebook and that newspapers & magazines have to be present on that platform to get views. They can't really get around posting to Fb, can they? If Fb suddenly cuts a major source of revenue for a whole industry without any discussion, if that is Fb's power, then this is really unhealthy for our market economy and our ideas of democracy

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
The Web is an open platform. Facebook is not some big brother who has power to censor anything. People can type https://nytimes.com https://nytimes.com to go directly go to the new york times if they want. From Facebook's point of view, these media sites are nothing more than parasites that try to write sensational articles to mislead the public and get people to fight online. Users become unhappy because they get into unnecessary arguments with their friends and family about things that ultimately have no right or wrong answer (such as politics), and end up blaming Facebook for facilitating it. Facebook is unhappy because their users are unhappy. It's only these short-sighted media companies that "benefit" off of the traffic (but in the long term not so much). By cutting this party out of the equation, users are happier. Facebook is happier. And I would say it's a good thing even for the media because essentially they are being cut off of access to the race to the bottom that's killing them. One of the reasons why these publications had to write sensationalism articles and disseminate them onto Facebook was because if they didn't, their competition would. Now that they are cut off, they are forced to compete in healthier ways. It's kind of hilarious because it's like these self-important media companies are some kids trying to get their hands on a cookie jar and fighting, and one day their mom (Facebook) takes it all away so nobody gets the cookie jar. The kids cry and bitch about it saying it's not fair. But soon something great happens. kids no longer fight because there's nothing to fight over, but go out to earn their own cookie in their own creative ways. They may even share the ones they earned with one another if they're generous. Anyway this has nothing to do with democracy, they're just doing the thing they've become good at doing--spinning news to fit their interest--like kids crying and complaining about how it's not fair that the free cookie jar is gone.

pjc50 9y ago

> It's journalists who sold their soul so that they can make money. Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible. > It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?

BayesStreet 9y ago
Just because the pay is bad doesn't refute the point that they haven't sold their souls, it's a race to the bottom where selling out for terrible pay is preferable to having integrity for no pay.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
> Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible. I think I should have clarified. When I said "journalists", i used it in the same context as this article. Which means by "journalists" I meant "journalistic organisations". I have worked with and know many journalists who have high integrity. But at the end of the day it's the organization as a whole that decides what to focus on. So yeah, from my experience I'm pretty sure they all get into journalism because of their ideal and each journalist as an individual (especially those who work at those top newspapers) has high journalistic integrity, but my impression is that this spirit is dying away as new entrants see what's going on in the ecosystem. It's no secret that these media companies who pride themselves on having high bar for journalistic integrity have started pouring efforts to emulate Buzzfeed (and I'm not using Buzzfeed as symbolism, they have explicitly tried to study Buzzfeed and emulate it) > Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias? I think I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but I believe this is possible if you hire people from the both ends of the spectrum and write both points of view about the same story. This is impossible at the moment because the entire organization tends to consist of mostly left wing people or mostly right wing people, etc. It's a "company culture" thing, and you can't do this unless you change the company culture fundamentally.

detaro 9y ago

Kind of sad to see such a generic "journalism is bad!" rant with IMHO useless generalizations at the top of the comments here, instead of a discussion of the specific example. Yes, the relationship between Facebook and the media is problematic, but that doesn't mean every journalist using it "sold his soul" and that Facebook shouldn't be careful about how they experiment with changing this. I get cutting down on noise, but it sounds like they made following a page basically irrelevant (since the "explore" tab apparently has "recommended content it thinks you might find interesting, including posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed yet" (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/facebooks-discovery-focused-explore-feed-hits-the-desktop/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/facebooks-discovery-focuse... ). That sounds a bit much. Large media companies that "sold out" might be able to afford to promote some stories (which then will have to have a higher profit, pushing even more click-bait?), but for smaller actors as described in the article that seems unlikely. That kind of sounds like this move pushes what you dislike about "journalism" even more?

eighthnate 9y ago

> Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays. Not only that. These same journalists are the ones demanding censorship of opposing views on FB and the rest of social media. All these selfish greedy journalists want is their own "fake news" making money on social media and other people's "fake news" banned. Frankly, I wish google, fb, twtr, etc would all band together and just ban all news from their platform for a week. Maybe that will quiet these useless journalists.