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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]

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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] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

All of the news where I live is paywalled.

Why should Facebook pay for content that users cannot even access? Surely anyone who is actually paying for access isn't finding articles from Facebook - they are getting the news directly from the source.

The only content that isn't paywalled is from ABC, but their definition of "local" news is national news which happens to be a story about something that happened here. Usually reported on so poorly it's obvious the journalist lives a few thousand kilometres away and doesn't really understand the issue at all.

The state of journalism in Australia is really bad - but I don't think Facebook paying Murdoch did anything at all to fix things. If anything news is even worse now than it was few years ago when the deal was originally signed.

The government needs to go back to the drawing board and re-think their approach. Personally i'd like to see something similar to our health system where we have a national journalism budget dedicated to funding private journalists the same way Medicare funds businesses in the medical industry.

And make sure there are strict rules around ethical journalism and also encourage original reporting - zero funding if you re-hash news broken by someone else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I really love the Medicare-esque model idea. It leaves room for journalists to be creative in their approaches, while demanding a minimum level of competency in their reporting. This of course would mean those shaded truths would probably still have to be passed, but the outright lies will be squashed. It also means journalists policing journalists, alla 'media watch' are also included in the funding model.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Would this mean free news for all residents and citizens and journalist get paid for consumption?