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.
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.
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) 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] Lxr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt4077|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|9 years ago|reply
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) 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
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] makomk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragontamer|9 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] ekianjo|9 years ago|reply
Erm, no, Journalism has been stuck in delivering biased information/junk facts for a long, long time, well before the Internet.
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _rpd|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemotron|9 years ago|reply
If they have editorial power then it's time to do away with the Digital Safe Harbors and time to consider antitrust.
[+] [-] debt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mahn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|9 years ago|reply
Facebook has a market cap that dwarfs what it cost to put the Philae lander on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
[+] [-] wu-ikkyu|9 years ago|reply
Print journalism was (relatively) one to many.
Social media is many to many.
[+] [-] pdelbarba|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes their echo chamber.
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intended|9 years ago|reply
It's everyone's preference to want cocaine. Heck cocaine is designed to be everyone's preference.
That doesn't mean that a race to the journalistic or hedonistic bottom is valuable or unstoppable.
These are social hygiene and security issues that need to be handled.
[+] [-] metaphorm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hectorr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbardle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpazyaquian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustynails77|9 years ago|reply
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