News Will Be Fine, Unless It’s Local
Four and a half thoughts on the fate of news organizations in the aftermath of the Facebook news feed changes.
For publishers, tweaks to the Facebook news feed have not been unlike flu season. Once unleashed, a miserable waiting game begins. You’ve built up your audience and gotten your flu shot, but will any of it matter? You watch as friend and foe alike succumb to an invisible menace, their fevers rising and traffic referrals plummeting. Hoping to avoid the same fate, you follow orders: Wash your hands, avoid close contact, pivot to video, create content that readers want to share. A few anxious months pass and, if you’re lucky, you’ve escaped unscathed, at least until next winter.
This time, however, feels different. There’s a morbid certainty to your fate when Facebook exiles publishers from the news feed that’s lacking from its optimizations to downgrade misleading headlines. As a result, the latest announcement feels less clickbait flu, from which you might avoid implication, than a publisher pandemic.
Reactions to this fate are drawn along predictable fault lines. Publishers that have made it through the digital wilderness are brushing off the impact — “This development is very good for all of media in the long run,” Justin Smith, Bloomberg Media CEO, told Digiday — while those still treading water are furious. “Platforms have been making decisions that stab virtual knives in our backs,” tweeted a reporter for The Denver Post in a thread urging readers to subscribe.
Following Facebook’s announcement, Audrey Cooper, the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, a member of the latter class of publications, penned an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. “You can do better than this,” she wrote. “Each decision you make that limits the reach of our journalism hurts our ability to effect positive change in our city and state.”
I want to agree with Cooper because traditionally, she’d be absolutely right. Facebook limiting the visibility of news on the platform and deprioritizing publishers undoubtedly hurts publishers’ ability to reach audiences, which hurts their ability to drive revenue, which hurts their ability to fund journalism in the public interest, which, finally, hurts the public’s ability to informed. Ipso facto, Facebook’s decision hurts journalism’s “ability to effect positive change in our city and state.”
But does traditional thinking still apply after everything that’s happened to the news industry? Are we certain deprioritizing publishers in the news feed will really have an impact on the public’s ability to be informed? Or are we only certain that it will have an impact on publishers’ ability to drive traffic and revenue?
In the last decade we’ve come to think of these things as the same thing, but I’ve been trying to take a non-publisher perspective on this news because it’s from that view that these decisions are being made.
Here’s where that thinking has left me:
1. News (probably) isn’t going anywhere on Facebook. The amount of news in the news feed is expected to drop from “roughly five percent” to “roughly four percent,” according to a Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg. This is a significant dip, but I’ll turn it back over to John Ingold, the Denver Post reporter, for why it may not be worth panicking about its impact on an informed citizenry.
“I’ve spent much of the last six months writing about … big state and national issues that affect a lot of people,” Ingold tweeted. “What’s my most-clicked story? A goofy thing about eclipse glasses. Meanwhile, this story looking at what Colorado Medicaid is doing to reduce opioid overdoses got fewer than 1,000 clicks.”
Every journalist knows this experience not to be the exception, but the rule. Facebook more than any other platform encourages the sharing of those goofier news stories. Should it decide that content is devoid of “meaningful engagement,” the news feed changes may not actually limit the kind of news that informs people. And with Facebook’s new Local News and Events experiment, the platform may even be trying to increase the footprint of journalism in the public interest on Facebook. (I said I was trying to look at these things from a different perspective, didn’t I?)
Of course, there’s also the potential that what’s lost in that one percent drop is the news in the public interest — after all, Ingold’s Medicaid story got fewer than 1000 clicks, which doesn’t sound like meaningful engagement. But if one thing’s for sure, it’s that it’s too early to say.
2. We’ve (partly) solved the digital news business model. After a decade of treading water in the stormy seas of the internet’s evolution, news organizations have their answer for how to run a business in the digital age. Leaving the nonprofit approach for another conversation, you’re left with two options: Publish content that either reaches audiences at scale or reaches premium audiences. Each approach grants you continued access to the hyper-competitive, ever-shrinking pool of advertising revenue, but also, as subscriptions come back in favor, to the pocketbooks of your readers.
For the New York Times and The Guardian, national and global audiences contributing small amounts has added up to a meaningful revenue stream. Meanwhile smaller but wealthier audiences can make up ground quickly for publishers like The Information and Axios.
3. Unfortunately, there are two troublesome problems with this solution.
3a. The first problem is that the incentives to build either of the monetizable audiences have created a cacophonous surplus of publishers.
Viewed through one lens, this is a beautiful element of the internet. Anyone can be a publisher; quality, not access to a printing press, will win the day. This was the prevailing theory for most of the past decade. Unfortunately, most of this content doesn’t add any original reporting or new information — the raw material of an informed public — to the conversation. Instead, we’ve created an ecosystem of takes, published as quickly as possible, adding little of substance to the discussion, designed to attract runoff traffic from news events.
As I wrote in a previous post:
In a print media ecosystem where distribution was limited regionally and consumption was limited to a few publishers per reader, it made sense for dozens of reporters to write the same story for different readers. Then, the approach worked in service of the audience. Today, it’s executed exclusively for publishers.
Now that we’re seeing the dizzying effects of such a warped ecosystem play out, it’s increasingly obvious that the surplus doesn’t contribute to a healthy marketplace of ideas — it’s simply the haphazard result of business incentives misaligned with journalism’s mission to inform the public.
Thankfully, this first problem now seems to be solving itself.
As the pool of advertising dollars available to publishers flattens out and publishers turn to readers for subscriptions, there will only be so much money to go around. Publishers who don’t make meaningful contributions to the marketplace of ideas will likely wither away, unable to attract subscribers, while the limited number who do will find themselves anointed the new papers of record for the 21st century.
Viewed through that lens, Facebook’s news feed changes will likely hasten this inevitable outcome, cutting off traffic to those who can’t earn revenue by other means. While nobody is cheering the demise of those publishers, it’s worth looking at what we’re losing from the perspective of an informed public — ultimately the whole point of the operation — rather than that of the publisher.
3b. The second issue with the business model that’s emerged — revenue derived from scaled or premium audiences — is that it inherently doesn’t work at the local level. Local news organizations can’t achieve scale, nor can they choose to target premium audiences. While this now seems painfully obvious, we’ve only absorbed this lesson after completely restructuring the entire industry — national and local news — around this new paradigm.
In the last century, every newspaper shared the same business model and it worked. Whether you were the New York Times or Louisville Courier Journal, your readers and advertisers had little choice about where to deploy their attention and budgets. When the internet emerged, publishers naively assumed things would stay that way as they begrudgingly migrated to digital. Once they arrived, they inevitably adopted the same digital advertising model, recognized their new economic reality, lay off portions of their newsroom, and insisted that those remaining do more with less.
Despite major differences among the species of news organizations — niche vs. general, national/global vs. local — news had a single strategy: advertising. While they exhibited variations in advertising tactics — brand vs. direct response, programmatic vs. direct sales, native vs. display — the only meaningful differences between their strategies were scale and pricing.
Predictably, if depressingly, one size did not fit all, but with no alternatives, local publishers had no real choice but to try to make it work.
And here’s the tragedy: Local news organizations are now left decimated by decisions made chasing a business model we know cannot sustain them. Where they once had allies in the struggle, they’re now left to fend for themselves. National newspapers can now rely on the scale of their audience to build successful subscription businesses that make up for advertising losses, while certain niche publications can rely on premium audiences to do the same. The local publications are left hopeless, no closer to answers than they were a decade ago.
It’s why Facebook’s decision to cut news from the news feed stings particularly bitterly for them. Traffic was never enough, but the steady flow from Facebook helped keep them alive. While subscriptions may seem attractive, the prices you’d have to charge to drive enough revenue may not be an option outside wealthy zip codes. Apart from the nonprofit model, it’s not clear what the future holds for local news.
4. But it’s always darkest before the dawn. A decade of chasing dollars to survive has left the news ecosystem in a bad place — and not only from a business perspective. The kind of content we’re producing and the velocity with which its produced aren’t innocent when it comes to the state of today’s marketplace of ideas. We’ve been so focused on survival that we’ve compromised more than we realize. While news organizations are producing some of the best journalism that’s ever been produced, they’re simultaneously drowning it out by producing a surplus of content that has no reason for existing beyond the advertising around it.
I’ll end with a quote from Franklin Foer, who puts the idea better than I could:
[I]nstead of clobbering Facebook one more time, media should now thank it. Facebook has just done media the biggest favor of them all. It has forced media to face the fact that digital advertising and ever-growing web traffic will never sustain the industry, especially if that traffic comes from monopolies like Facebook hoping to claim the entirety of digital-advertising dollars for themselves. Media can’t deny this, but it doesn’t want to sustain the pain and heartbreak that comes with transition; and it’s reluctant to let go of the notion that it might exploit Facebook to achieve global scale. Now, Zuckerberg has broken that too — and freed media from a delusion that it should have discarded long ago.
Full Disclosure: I work as a product marketing manager at Twitter, working with publishers to drive reach, engagement and revenue on the platform. The opinions above are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer. Previously, I worked at The Atlantic leading its branded content team.
