The one where we explain how journalism went wrong
If you clicked on this expecting a nice little listicle on why your Facebook feed is full of, well, you know, listicles, then we’re really sorry but we’re going to have to disappoint you.
Instead, you’ll be getting a long, meandering ramble on what went wrong with the news business. The way we see it, if you’ve bothered to tear yourself away from the chocolate fondue videos in your Facebook feed, we might as well make sure its worth your while.
If you’re still reading, excellent. With that out of the way we can begin the real journey. A journey back in time. We’re not going back that far, though. Only about 20 years or so. A time when people actually looked forward to an episode of Friends, rather than just binge watching it on a hungover Saturday afternoon. Speaking of which, the first episode is about to start…
Episode 1 — The one when Google accidentally kills the news industry
September 4th 1998. A time when “Amazon” still referred to a river, Taylor Swift hadn’t taken over the world and a Clinton had just hit political rock bottom.
Some things never change.
It was also the day when Google Inc. officially came into existence. Though things might have been totally different had the Washington Post decided to invest in the fledgling start up, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were to fundamentally change the nature of the of the news industry.
Even though Google was an incredible source of traffic for major newspapers, its financial backers needed it to grow up and actually make money. They settled on online advertising as the best way to do so. Google has been a money making machine ever since, taking nearly $75bn in revenues last year. Sadly for the newspaper industry, this money doesn’t grow on trees, it comes from the pockets of advertisers. Advertisers who until very recently had been their best customers.
The ever-increasing sums of money that advertisers were spending with Google meant they had to make cutbacks elsewhere. Increasingly they chose to forgo advertising with newspapers. To make things even worse, it turns out that fewer and fewer young people actually thought buying newspapers was a good way to spend their money. Once they could get the news for free on a phone, it made no sense to spend money on a paper you’d end up just leaving on the tube.
Whatever the motivations, the end result was that many newspapers started to realise that print wouldn’t be a sustainable business model in the long run. Still, at least Google was still sending them online traffic and people were actually spending valuable time reading their journalism. The newspapers were still in control. Kind of.
Episode 2: The one where Facebook eats the internet
Think about how much time you spend on Facebook. Compare it how much you time you spend on any one news website. If you are anything like the rest of us, your Facebook news feed has become exactly that: the default way you find out about the world around you. Whilst this seems like no big deal at first, when you scratch beneath the surface it raises some slightly troubling questions.
Facebook is a social network. You see stories based on the way your friends respond to them. This seems obvious but it actually has a profound impact on the kind of stories that do well. When you share a story on Facebook, often people share it less for what the story says, but rather what it says about them.
Let’s face it, there is no worse feeling than sharing something and the dreaded lull before you get a notification that someone has liked it. If that is a feeling that isn’t familiar to you, congratulations. You are the one friend everyone has, the friend with no real concept of social cost and who fills up everyone else’s newsfeed with 10 ways to meet the love of your life. Based on our own tiny sample size of personal experience, you are almost certainly one of our parents.
Whilst this might seem like a tangential point, it turns out to be one with huge implications for the news industry. Facebook has acquired the biggest audience on the internet and in order to tap into that audience, journalists need to write stories that people will share until they go viral. People share a mix of breaking news, things that make themselves look good, or simply stories that no one could disagree with.
So that’s what journalists write.
And that’s why if Watergate happened today, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward would probably be too busy writing 29 Cats That Forgot How to Cat to care.
And that’s why cute animals/GIFs/memes dominate your newsfeed.
Even more worryingly, in order to make a story go truly viral it can’t just appeal to the first few initial readers, it has to be something that their friends can share too, and friends of their friends too. When faced with trying to write for an audience of hundreds of millions it becomes impossible to really go into detail on any one particular subject, as the interests of your audience matter far less than their social networks. As a publisher you end up having to appeal to the lowest common denominator, potentially explaining why even the most well regarded publishers are churning out stories like ‘Signs we are definitely at peak avocado’.
Clearly then, the real world impact of Facebook has been seismic for news organisations and, by extension, the kind of news we actually read. With advertisers chasing an audience overwhelmingly concentrated on Facebook, newspapers have found their meagre remaining revenues being slashed. At the same time, Facebook’s algorithms are forcing publishers to change the way they reach readers, forcing them to write lowest-common-denominator content for mass audiences in order to make any money. All too often, quantity is prized over quality.
Increasingly, publishers are forced to sell the only commodity they have left, their editorial independence, and its now common to see entire articles explicitly sponsored by commercial entities. In the media landscape of today, the most financially successful companies outlets aren’t necessarily the old giants, but new media upstarts which can often seem like advertising companies with journalists bolted on.
Episode 3: The one where shit gets real
2016 was hardly a vintage year.
We lost a Prince, a princess and a professor, but it was in politics where things really kicked off.
Whilst Ed Balls’ transformation from failed politician to national sweetheart would probably be the headline story in any other year, 2016 also had the small matter of Brexit, the Corbynisation of the Labour Party and the election of a US president who used the size of his hands as a key selling point.
What is even stranger is that there may be a credible argument that the change in our news habits directly lead to the political upheaval in 2016. We’ve already seen how Facebook is designed to show you stories you’re likely to engage with. According to the Edge Rank algorithm that Facebook uses, positive engagement is the most important metric of all.
This is all well and good when we restrict it to funny cat GIFs. After the year we’ve had, we probably need them. However, it does create some pretty worrying issues when applied to the political sphere. It means that your Facebook feed is designed to be full of things you already agree with.
So if you’re a Trump supporter who suspects Hillary might just be a demonic being, Facebook will feed you stories that reinforce that bias, potentially leading you to storm into a pizza restaurant with an assault rifle, convinced its basement is secretly the headquarters of a Clinton-organised child sex ring.
No really. That actually happened.
Needless to say, the politicians who excelled in 2016 realised this massive shift in how we get our news and switched their focus to connecting directly with voters on social media. Jeremy Corbyn’s press team primarily relied on Facebook to reach out to their core base during Owen Smith’s leadership challenge. And whatever you think of Donald Trump, his success was partly down to the realisation that it mattered less what the media wrote about him and more about what he tweeted about the media.
Oh, and for those you hopeful that it can’t get any worse we leave you with just one little fact. Next year’s French presidential election is widely expected to come down to a two horse race between centre right François Fillon and far right Marine Le Pen. Currently Fillon has just over 200 thousand followers on Facebook. Le Pen has nearly 1.2 million.
Gulp.
Episode 4 — The one where no one knows what happens next
So yeah, things aren’t looking great right now.
We live in a world where it has never been more important to be up to date on what is going on around us, yet most of the organisations that used to do this job are on the verge of going out of business.
No one really knows what to do about either. If you ask ten media executives where they see the future of the industry you’ll probably get ten different answers. Well, not probably, definitely. We actually asked them. Basically, it seems no one really seems to have a clue whats going on.
Luckily, we think there might be a solution. So we’re building it.
‘Till next week…
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