this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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106
Facebook ate and then ignored the news industry. It's hard, but we should leave it be (www.abc.net.au)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Try and get past the fact that this is sort-of about Facebook. Because it's more about the demise of news than it is about Facebook, specifically.

news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said.

"They were in the attention-attraction business.

"In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be.

"But now there are just much better places to be."

The moment news moved online, and was "unbundled" from classifieds, sports results, movie listings, weather reports, celebrity gossip, and all the other reasons people bought newspapers or watched evening TV bulletins, the news business model was dead.

News by itself was never profitable, Professor Bruns said.

"Then advertising moved somewhere else.

"This was always going to happen via Facebook or other platforms."

It's a really fascinating read. We can all agree that independent journalism is valuable in our society, but ultimately, most of us don't so much seek news out as much as we encounter news as we go about our day.

I'm sure the TL;DR bot is about to entirely miss the nuance of the article. I recommend reading the whole thing.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but at the same time, what is the response?

  1. The Government insists that Facebook pays a royalty for news articles shared on its platform.
  2. Facebook bans news articles on its platform (again) instead of paying anything.
  3. Nobody on Facebook sees news; just disinformation and propaganda.

Facebook already has the engagement they want. While they grew that platform engagement partially from news content, they have it now and no longer need news content. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they no longer want news on their platform.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe make the royalty per user rather than per article. Then there's no incentive to ban news.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

A royalty for what though? To display the headline of a news article and the first few words? I hate Facebook as much as anyone on Lemmy but I don't think they owe the media a cent.

We don't need these media outlets anyway, we have the ABC which doesn't need to be profitable. Most print media has extreme political biases which shape public thought by focusing on something to make it seem more common. An example: youth crime in Queensland, the number of offences has been in decline however the media give it disproportionate coverage to make it seem like the government isn't doing enough. They like the LNP, they want the LNP in power. In Queensland Labor are in power, they don't like them, so they lie.

Edit: And how about their lies about Climate Change, the referendum and literally anything. They can go and get fucked