John,
I do think you have the right frame. But it isn’t just that news organizations and media companies want to morph into tech companies. It’s that we seem to be moving to a completely different way of publishing stories, the buzzword being distributed content.
It’s a profound change. Previously, most digital publishing had the same goal, to publish great stories that were unique to a particular publisher, like The New York Times or Buzzfeed. The publisher wanted to drive the audience to its own, individual Website or ap to read such articles, to develop brand loyalty and perhaps lure new subscribers, in the case of the Times, anyway. Then it was great to have the story blown out on social media.
In phase one of the Web, publishers competed as they did in the old days of newsprint. By publishing an important scoop on its site and drawing a big audience to those “only in the Times” or “only in Buzzfeed” stories, readers were supposed to habitually go to a trusted or entertaining news source.
The aggregators began to weaken this model. But distributed content is something more radical. In the early days of the Internet, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said he was “agnostic” whether a Times reader absorbed Times content in print or digitally, as long it was on some form of the published New York Times. Now we have huge tech companies, like Facebook and Snapchat, publishing the scoops, stories and breaking news coverage directly on their own giant platforms. The traditional publishers get a lot of potential pluses, chiefly exposing an audience of billions to their journalism and additional advertising revenue at a point when most publishers must see their digital ad revenue grow rapidly in order to support expensive, crucial accountability journalism. Does distributed content now mean publishers have become agnostic about how and where readers discover and read their published work? A story read on Facebook, with a faster loading time in the form of an Instant Article, is just as good as one read on an individual ap or Website, some might argue.
I don’t have a clear position, but I do have worries. I worry about newsroom culture dissipating. Some of my best days at the Times were when reporters would gather in excitement from all over the newsroom when the Times was about to go up with a big story. This happened many times, but a particularly memorable example was when the Times published on its Website the Pulitzer-winning scoop about former Governor Eliot Spitzer being investigated for call girls. Within minutes, our homepage was on CNN. That excited my newsroom colleagues and made them proud to be at the Times. Now I worry that each story and reporter becomes its own atomic part, published in multiple places, encountered by most readers on huge social media sites. What impact will this have on newsroom culture, which is an essential ingredient of what makes New York Times accountability journalism in a class by itself. Will anyone notice that Buzzfeed has spent months investigating the Texas prison system and indigent defendants if the story is mostly consumed on social media. And what happens to the healthy competition between news organizations when their journalism is published as a distributed, greatest hits compendium. Will readers notice where the stories are coming from?
Another worry, the platforms seem to want to remain platforms. But shouldn’t they be responsible for adhering to and upholding the First Amendment tenets and other basic values that are crucial to quality journalism. The social media platforms have big voices in Washington. Will they leave it only to the publishers to fight battles on key issues such as shielding reporters from subpoenas. The DNA of the tech companies and the publishers are different, but if these are real, lasting partnerships in a world of distributed content, they both have a stake in what a free press can publish.
And, on the subject of politics, it isn’t a coincidence that so many tech companies have former political spokesman (gunslingers) on their payrolls. Jay Carney’s response on Medium was an example of politics as much as media criticism. It’s commonplace to try to delegitimize a political opponent rather than make nuanced criticisms. That was the framework for his attack on the Times over the Amazon story.
