Paperless Publishing — News via Social Media

This week the old and the new of the news industry were wedded, but will they remain together until death do they part? The New York Times reported that it had agreed to move articles from its own site to Facebook. The deal mirrors the popular app Snapchat’s recent move to have different “stories” set up by such news outlets as Vice, ESPN, and CNN, updated daily, that can be easily accessed by every Snapchat user. Like the Snapchat deal, the Facebook-Times deal is supposed to be mutually beneficial. The Times would presumably add more users to Facebook and, more importantly, keep those that use Facebook from leaving the site for outside content, and Facebook would give the newspaper a cut of the ad revenue.
While New York’s most famous paper will lose clicks on its own website, the direct access to Facebook’s 1.4 billion users will presumably help win the Times more subscribers and to reach an even larger audience. This deal is just another step down the line of digital companies trying to combine social media, news, and entertainment into one entity. A simple look to Microsoft and Sony shows the same strategy: each company has integrated music, movies, apps, games, websites, and even news, to their gaming consoles, the Xbox One and PS4 respectively. It is important to note that the laws of the universe are still in effect: nothing can either be created or destroyed. So, as we gain convenience and hear stories we might not have heard otherwise, what are we losing? Anatoliy Gruzd, director of the social media lab at Ryerson University, worries that the paper will sacrifice quality at the temptation of having access to this wide of an audience.
The director notes that the popular posts on social media are “‘big, national news, happy, engaging stories, whimsical stories.’” What he is noting is that people rally behind what is popular on social media. We yearn for stories that connect all of us, simple evils we can all fight against, and things that are universally liked. Social media is essentially news created by the everyman and it is created for personal enjoyment. This is diametrically opposed to the point of journalism. Journalism is not supposed to be driven by the wants of individuals, but for a universal need for truth and for change. Will social media change for the news, or will the news change for social media?
With the conglomeration of news outlets, one is reminded of the literary canon established for schools across the countries in order to have shared experiences and to make sure every student is taught certain ideals. This new deal has essentially created a news canon for adults: every adult should read The New York Times, National Geographic, and the other news outlets that are beginning to make deals with Facebook. The exception being that this is not a national canon, but a global canon. It will make it harder for smaller, more local, news outlets to exist and it marks a clear move towards globalization. Reuben Stern, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, bluntly asks, “How are [local news organizations] going to exist in a landscape where Facebook determines what readers are going to read?” — but does Facebook determine what people read? While we may always want this feeling of connectivity and common ground that the level playing-field of social media gives us, we simultaneously always want to feel different.
It is hard to imagine a world in which locality entirely collapses, as Stern eerily forewarns. No local sports teams? No local artists? No local news? Social media is fresh, and in its freshness there is an added grandeur. People have never been able to feel this close together, to talk about similar experiences with people they have never met, to have a shared world that transcends borders and oceans alike, but in time people will want to be different. We already see this today in the hipster backlash against the mainstream. While local papers may struggle today and while giant publishers continue to combine and combine, there will always be a want for distinction that only local flair, individual experiences, and smaller publishers can provide. Individuality never goes out of business.
Works Cited: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/facebook-york-times-deal-could-090000180.html