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> I'd rank a lot of other things higher than social media on a list of "destroyers of local journalism" Why is that? I would rank it pretty high. It's true t
by gerbilly 9y ago
> I'd rank a lot of other things higher than social media on a list of "destroyers of local journalism"
Why is that? I would rank it pretty high.
It's true that online advertising killed of a lot of the ad revenue that newspapers relied on, but I think social media are also killing the newspapers simply by displacing people's 'news browsing' behaviour from a newspaper or magazine to a facebook feed.
A lot of people get all their news from social media, and that proportion is growing.
To add to that behavioural effect, media outlets also give away their content on facebook as well, believing that it would be better to have a presence than to ignore the platform .
They are basically giving their product away for free on one of the very platforms that is destroying the industry.
- andrenotgiant 9y agoMaybe Social Media is a nail in Local Newspaper's coffin, but Craigslist and Google Local came first, and put them in the coffin. From Wikipedia's "Decline of Newspapers"[1] >Free services like Craigslist have decimated the classified advertising departments of newspapers, some of which depended on classifieds for 70% of their ad revenue [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers
- gerbilly 9y agoBoth are factors, and I don't honestly know which is the larger factor, however, it's no longer just local papers that are affected. The large national dailies are getting thinner and thinner each year, each month it seems. Compare a Sunday times from today to one from the early nineties if you remember them. This is not good. A clickbait article on facebook that has been targeted to appeal to your biases is not the same thing as real journalism.