3 ms·
>One potential reason why Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been singled out for criticism of practices that seem common in the tech industry (and are often pro
by atlasunshrugged 7y ago
>One potential reason why Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been singled out for criticism of practices that seem common in the tech industry (and are often pro-consumer) may be due to the prevailing business model in the journalism industry. Google and Facebook are by far the largest competitors in the digital advertising market, and Amazon is expected to be the third-largest player by next year, according to eMarketer. As Ramsi Woodcock pointed out, news publications are also competing for advertising dollars, the type of conflict of interest that usually would warrant disclosure if, say, a journalist held stock in a company they were covering.
I see this argument echoed a lot and I doubt it's as overt as this. Maybe journalists inadvertently have some bias towards social media platforms because they see it hurting their industry or leading to a fight over clicks rather than quality content (which I do believe most journalists would prefer to create rather than clickbait). I find it harder to believe that journalists have banded together to fight all of the platforms that are potential competitors to them; an individual journalist probably just doesn't have that incentive and a news org probably couldn't keep a coordinated activity like trying to fight social media companies secret (I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough)
- p1necone 7y agoAgreed. The much more blindingly obvious reason to me seems to be that Google, Facebook and Amazon are just really huge companies. Why would you write articles about something smaller?
- jeanperrot 7y agoAre you implying that Microsoft is smaller than Google, Facebook or Amazon? Using market capitalization as a measure, Microsoft is currently the larger company.
- wanderer2323 7y ago>I mean, trying to keep a secret cabal among journalists must be pretty tough It does not have to be a 'secret cabal', just a group of like-minded individuals soft-coordinating their responses. JournoList [0] has existed for three years before being made public. When exposure forced JournoList to close, the response from the members was immediately to create another group like it [1]. What also telling is that the members don't think of themselves being a part of 'secret cabal', which allows for the double-think of coordinating responses while being sincerely sure they do no such thing [ibid.]. JournoList is not just an isolated example. There was at least GameJournoPros (no good source link unfortunately), explicitly modeled after JournoList and it's safe to assume that many more exist. [0] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList [1] :: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList#Cabalist_spin-off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList#Cabalist_spin-off