Facebook vs the networks

Facebook always has the upper hand, and the journalism world has noticed

I clench my fist just a little––in addition to seriously questioning the decision––when NPR’s Facebook account has a Facebook live feed of two journalists discussing in their newsroom in front of a couple hundred viewers. The subject is interesting, but the use of the medium is not appropriate. The setting is bland and the sound quality is not ideal, which is certainly not what the Zuckerbergian utopia envisioned when it launched the feed.

But perhaps that’s why the collaboration never worked to begin with. Newspapers, radio stations and cable networks haven’t all figured out how to best use it, which explains why one of the most viewed videos on Facebook live was two Buzzfeeders putting elastics around a watermelon, not a sit down talk about the ACHA.

Yet I’m optimist that a better partnership could be made.

That’s why Sarah Frier and Gerry Smith’s story, Media Companies Are Getting Sick of Facebook, is a must-read. First, they write, the California-based company tried to sell publications on the idea of Paper, a Facebook-first news-reading app. The company then transitioned to the Instant Articles you often get on your newsfeed today.

Afterwards, Facebook started paying nominal fees for publications to create live content (i.e take that money, and do something with it) similar to what NPR does. Now, Facebook wants to push the relationship farther, Grier and Smith report for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Facebook’s latest pitch to publishers such as CNN is for them to provide a regular stream of TV-quality, edited, original videos that will give Mark Zuckerberg’s company a chance to compete with YouTube to siphon some of the $70 billion pouring into TV ads each year.

Facebook’s main goal is to keep users on its website. That’s why when a user shares a link, it doesn’t rank very high in the algorithm since the company prefers not having its consumers leave for another webpage. That’s why videos and live feeds are a win for publications and Facebook, according to the latter. Increasingly though, what we’ve been hearing from those publications is that the California-based company is consistently getting the upper hand.

This brings us back to Instant Articles, which the New York Times and The Guardian have left. Facebook’s inherent goal was to keep readers on its website, but these two major newspapers noticed they weren’t gaining anything from the new medium (Facebook has since announced that it would allow publishers to put ads in Instant Articles).

CNN general manager of digital operations Andrew Morse tells the two Bloomberg journalists in the piece that the “financial compensation Facebook offers isn’t enough to convince him that working directly with the social network will be worthwhile in the long term.”

Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Context Next, a industry trade organization, tells Bloomberg that “media companies are like serfs working Facebook’s land.”

I’d love to see a better partnership between Facebook and news publications, but you can’t expect the best of collaboration between a company worth hundreds of billions with a struggling industry. A lot of news publications are dying, and Facebook holds the lifeboat.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

What I’ve observed and read this week

(where I write about things I think about)

• Major shakeup going on at HuffPost. A couple of weeks ago, the publication’s Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim left for The Intercept. Last week, 39 HuffPost employees were laid off. Six of them worked in the Washington bureau. On Monday, Politico reported that Senior Politics Editor Sam Stein was also leaving.
• The man who wrote that article for Politico, Joe Pompeo, is also leaving his publication. He’ll be the new senior media correspondent for Vanity Fair’s The Hive, a page I’ve come to really enjoy in the past year. Pompeo is a great addition to Nick Bilton and Sarah Ellison.
• Pompeo writes the Morning Media newsletter. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hadas Gold take on that role.
• A lot was said of the Megyn Kelly-Alex Jones interview that aired on Kelly’s new NBC Sunday night show. Should Jones be given a platform considering that, amongst other things, he said the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax? There aren’t many better writers than Jack Shafer these days, and once again, the Politico writer delivers in this essay about the said interview.
• Shafer writes: “How, exactly, can you examine a newsworthy subject — and like it or not, somebody the president talks to and cites is newsworthy — without giving him some sort of a platform? There’s an unspoken assumption that instead of reporting on the politically deformed — people like Sen. Joe McCarthy, George Lincoln Rockwell, Gov. George Wallace, Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and others — the press should quarantine such figures from readers’ and viewers’ eyes lest their contagion spread.”
• I can’t agree more.
• Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes a really interesting piece about the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit that defends student journalists in the United States. Sullivan lists a lot situations where the SPLC helped out high school or university papers.
• “LoMonte [the SPLC’s executive director] helped a reporter at the student newspaper at New Jersey’s Kean University as she tried to pry loose a surveillance video that the university’s police department was wrongly withholding. Once the reporter had the video, she wrote an important story that brought to light a former student’s claim that he suffered excessive force and racial profiling in a 2013 arrest by campus cops.”
• Another interesting statistics given to Sullivan by LoMonte: “There are probably three times more journalists in America working for school credit than for a paycheck”
• The Gawker-Hulk Hogan trial is the subject of a new Netflix documentary. Titled Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, the film is directed by American Brian Knappenberger.