Job losses, declining circulations and local newspaper closures could mean spread of misinformation in pivotal election year
As the election battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden begins, there are growing fears around the health of the US news media which has been struck by job losses, declining circulations, the closure or crippling of well-known brands and rise of new threats such as fake or AI-generated information on social media.
Evidence of this state of crisis abounds. Last year, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest since 2020, when 16,060 cuts were recorded when print was still in the process of being succeeded by digital news distribution. Major names including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Vice have taken serious hits, alongside scores of smaller brands and the total collapse of newcomers such as the Messenger.
“We’ve settled into the final act of the election season, and it’s promising to be the harbinger of all kinds of problems because of the nature of the candidates,” says Robert Thompson at Syracuse University. At the same time, he says, “the very industry that should be girding up for this is in a total state of crisis”.
Readership and income from digital production has been falling overall, and industry downsizing in 2024 appears to be accelerating. Meanwhile, social media is uncoupling as a referral service to news organizations, which hits both readership size and revenue generation. Meta has dropped its news tab from Facebook, Google is more unpredictable, and X has de-prioritized posts that contain outside referrals.
Readers are fleeing to mediums in which fresh dangers lurk, even when accounting for the partisan nature of some US news sites. The share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023, yet such sites are subject to the threat of viral misinformation – whether deliberately sown or spread organically.
The primary use of ad blockers isn't to ensure the websites don't make money but to protect the end user from unwanted effects of intrusive advertising. If we're expected to be concerned with their loss of revenue they should be as concerned about ads masquerading as OS prompts, scams feigning legitimacy, false medical or financial claims, malware and miners being injected etc. If they won't accept responsibility or accountability for the material they are serving and effectively endorsing then it's only prudent for the users to protect themselves.
And if they want to attract subscribers instead of relying on advertising income then they should also avoid racing to the bottom by (solely) relying on LLM generated "articles" and misleading clickbait tactics. If they have to rely on tricking their prospective customers then they aren't peddling something actually worthwhile and aren't owed a reward for doing so.
Who is the "they" in this. Google destroyed local news papers. All these smaller players can afford to do is open their sites up to google exchanges. It's a viscous cycle where the leaner your journalist team gets, the more you need click bait pages to drive ad views on those exchanges. I don't know what the solution to this looks like to raise journalistic standards and ensure they are funded, but I think that whatever it looks like will require readers to pay subscriptions and/or tolerate ads in their news.
"They" (the local newspapers) don't have to make that Faustian bargain but choose to because it's easier or more lucrative to. They could take meaningful steps to address and communicate to their readers that they care about the accuracy and informative aspects of their reporting as well as the safety and respect of their electronic systems used to access it.
Wikipedia doesn't have flashing boner pill pop-ups and their pages aren't filled with intentionally misleading information -- I strongly suspect their donations would fall off a cliff if that started to change. It's not a great comparison since the scale and business structures are different from local newspapers but other entities like PBS also show that people will donate for good/honest content.
Ad blockers just wrongly get painted with this brush as being horribly destructive to the poor companies that have no choice but to be evil when they were a logical consequence to the boundaries of acceptability being constantly pushed. We had and text, static banners -> animated banners, auto-playing sound/video, iFrames -> pop-ups -> recursive pop-ups -> mouse click & window resize disable scripts -> overlays -> unskippable full-page video -> multiple unskippable videos -> LLM/AI generated bogus content. And tons of other variations I'm not remembering at the moment. Ad blockers also (mostly) don't work properly when the ads are being served from the same source as the content; the newspapers could host the ads themselves and vouch for their safety and propriety.
There's definitely a loss of accountability in the ad-based economy.
Your newspaper in 1990 knew it had to specifically tag anything that looked too much like first party content as an advertorial. If they didn't vet their ads for some level of actual fraud, there was both reputstional and likely legal risk. Not to mention that print ads are static and won't start demanding notification permissions or playing audio.
"We plugged the Google ad tags into our template" denies them this control, so trust vanished and people responded with ad blockers.
I agree. Google and double click were a trojan horse for a lot of print media orgs trying to do digital. What looked like the gift of added revenue cheaply made these news orgs completely dependent on Google. The news publishers became a cheap commodity for delivering ad space all flowing through Google.