Is journalism dying?

I can't stand Carol Kirkwood, I hate how she says Englind, Scotlind. There's a news story for you.

This was on the sidebar and same sorta things except there is no cut and paste of Rachel doing letters or numbers.

http://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/833313/Rachel-Riley-Countdown-wardrobe-malfunction-dress-fruit-pastille-lolly-Twitter-fans-Channe

they literally publish one of those Carol Kirkwood stories every few days, see also "Carol Kirkwood wraps sensational curves in gorgeous green jacket for forecast" from 8th August, "Carol Kirkwood showcases ample bust in figure-hugging purple frock" from 7th August, "Carol Kirkwood thrills as she teases cleavage in low-cut navy frock" from 24th July, "Carol Kirkwood distracts viewers as she squeezes into plunging red dress" from 21st July, "Carol Kirkwood flashes PLENTY of cleavage in plunging jumpsuit as she takes to the skies" from 17th July, etc

it seems like the task of writing them is divided between several journalists rather than having one dedicated Carol-Kirkwood-perving correspondent, probably better for morale: imagine writing this story. how you'd feel about yourself.

https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-ad-breaks-are-not-bringing-in-a-lot-of-money-for-publishers/

Five publishers participating in Facebook’s mid-roll ads test, which began in March, said the product isn’t generating much money. One publisher said its Facebook-monetized videos had an average CPM of 15 cents. A second publisher, which calculated ad rates based on video views that lasted long enough to reach the ad break, said the average CPM for its mid-rolls is 75 cents. (Facebook’s mid-roll ads don’t show up inside videos in the first 20 seconds, which means many three-second video views aren’t “monetized views.”)

A third publisher made roughly $500 from more than 20 million total video views on that page in September.* (This publisher had not calculated its CPM, as its total video view count includes videos that were not monetized by Facebook mid-rolls.) A fourth publisher confirmed revenue was low without giving specifics. (A fifth publisher, when asked about its Facebook mid-roll CPMs, responded by texting lyrics to Flo Rida’s “Low.”)

am i the only person who's loath to click on any links anymore because the prospect of having my music drowned out by some annoying ad is too high

the secondmost obvious question is "what does facebook have to do with journalism?"

everything tbh

then we have a definitive answer to the question in the thread's title: no, it isn't dying. it would have to be alive to be dying.

aimless are you asking that question sincerely or being snide? because facebook and google (and to a lesser extent twitter and other platforms) have completely transformed the way news is disseminated and by extension the priorities of publishers

Like 3/4 of the world's population, I am not on fb and therefore never look at fb. Personally, I have no interest in ever changing this state of affairs. Consequently, fb has not transformed how news reaches me, unless it is solely responsible for the slow strangulation of the channels I still rely upon.

ftr, unlike fb, the Reagan administration's deregulation of broadcast media did completely transform the way news was disseminated to me; I stopped watching television news broadcasts. fb is slightly different, in that I never started looking at it to begin with.

Is journalism dying (for ILX poster Aimless, specifically)

is twitter dying?

okay well even though you're above fb, the rise of platforms has changed things for you on the supply sid

side

Like 3/4 of the world's population, I am not on fb

we call these ppl the 'movers + shakers'

I have no idea if I am above fb, but I am certainly outside it.

xp the way priorities have shifted in newsrooms is undeniable and it reverberates throughout publications. i don't think it's a good thing at all - it's extremely short sighted in the way it's practiced now especially - but it's happening.

anyway,

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors for these.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/business/las-vegas-shooting-fake-news.html

okay well even though you're above fb, the rise of platforms has changed things for you on the supply side

― maura, Tuesday, October 3, 2017 1:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

we call these ppl the 'movers + shakers'

hate to break it to you, but being on fb does not give you superpowers, or enhanced powers, or any kind of power at all that a body could notice, except the power to update your timeline or whatever it is fb people do.

Old Man Condescends At Cloud Computing

It really worries me that no-one at Facebook has had a moment of realization that "hey, maybe we should hire people to sift through these headlines/links for accuracy again."

lol Aimless are u really this thick bro?

Like, are they really and truly saving that much money in the long run?

before i can answer your carefully crafted question, you need to clarify how thick is "this thick"?

Raymond they got spooked by the right-wing media machine and its propensity for calling facts that aren't in line with their nihilistic death-cult ideologies "biased."

Paging Jethro Tull to thread

Erm, hate to wade in here but:

1. Not being on FB yourself doesn't mean that it doesn't affect what type and quality of information you take in. Ditto for TV news.

For comparison, NYT and WaPo have shaped what information people get even if they've never sauntered out to find either of those particular publications on their doorstep.

I hear there are even people who don't spend very much time on the internet. And yet what information they get is still, strangely, shaped by online culture in some ways. Mind. Blown.

2. If old-skool media outlets can barely fact-check anymore (and they pretty much can't), how on earth can we expect social-media sites to do a better job (working with exponentially more throughput, and vastly fewer staff)?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was responding to the assertion that facebook had "everything" to do with how news is disseminated. The assertion under consideration was not that fb was a influence, but that its influence was "everything".

um:

the secondmost obvious question is "what does facebook have to do with journalism?"

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, October 3, 2017 5:01 PM (one hour ago)

right. Maura's answer was: "everything tbh"

So your question was responding to the answer?

No, my question was a question. It was not obvious to me why this thread was chosen to post an excerpt from an article about "Facebook's mid-roll ads" and the poster's annoyance at having music interrupted by them. I can see now that my question was too inspecific, but it was based in genuine ignorance of facebook's interface and how users tend to use it, especially in that the article seemed to have little or nothing to do with journalism or its death.

The answer to my question was unenlightening, even though I am sure it seemed a beacon of truth to the person who offered it. Chalk it up to mutual incomprehension, based on living in somewhat different online cultures, but being called "thick" seems a bit much.

that was tracer's answer

lol

am i dying

I apologize for misattributing that answer to you, maura. When there's something of a pile-on in progress, one gets in a hurry to respond before there's a backlog of new replies.

I just wanted to make a Simpsons reference before the moment passed

Aimless otm

here have some links that outline how facebook and other platforms have refocused publishers' priorities as they move away from print and/or see print as a supplemental focus to the work they do online. i don't feel like i have to apologize for posting the above graf (which should have been funny for its use of flo rida anyway) or for explaining things in a way that you view as "unenlightening," but i'm kind of testy today. note that some of these links are two years old and some of them use google's amp (accelerated mobile pages) program, which is also influencing how stories get disseminated.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/digiday.com/media/facebooks-growing-influence-news-consumption-5-charts/amp/

http://fortune.com/2016/05/12/facebook-and-the-news/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.recode.net/platform/amp/2016/5/11/11656312/facebook-video-news-feed

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/facebooks-role-in-trumps-win-is-clear-no-matter-what-mark-zuckerberg-says/2017/09/07/b5006c1c-93c7-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html?utm_term=.ea4d3b7fcd6d

https://www.theawl.com/2015/07/platform-creep/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/business/sponsored-content-takes-larger-role-in-media-companies.html

About 95% of the links to stories I used to see on my FB feed dried up awhile back. Either an algorithm change or Ned taking a social media break.

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances, and (most importantly) advertisers of wildly varying repute, and imagine the splatter pattern of those stories being determined by an opaque algorithm created by a shadowy entity that has to constantly please wall street. on top of that imagine the statistics that show which stories do and don't get read being transmogrified into assignment editors for publications across the board. that's pretty much the situation we have here

hang on i think i figured out how to adapt the video game PAPERBOY for the big screen in that post

Imagine if Bethesda remade Paperboy

xpost... dammit

I was too slow

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hycrI1JV-_Q/hqdefault.jpg

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances, and (most importantly) advertisers of wildly varying repute, and imagine the splatter pattern of those stories being determined by an opaque algorithm created by a shadowy entity that has to constantly please wall street. on top of that imagine the statistics that show which stories do and don't get read being transmogrified into assignment editors for publications across the board. that's pretty much the situation we have here

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:42 (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hang on i think i figured out how to adapt the video game PAPERBOY for the big screen in that post

― maura, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 19:43 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Two booming posts, ty

imagine the doorstep-thrown newspaper of yore being turned into a bunch of discrete stories being thrown at you by friends, cousins, vague acquaintances

Well, rn the key is that stories are being thrown at me by MY friends, cousins, vague acquaintances etc. Which is fine; it's not a terrible replacement for having H.L. Mencken or Harold Ross or Ben Bradlee or whoever decide what stories are going to get thrown at me.

A different batch of stories is being thrown at and by the friends, cousins, vague acquaintances of othertribers - Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon. That's the downside of socialized gamified crowdsourced information-peddling.

and groups. don't forget groups! which were key to the russian disinfo campaigns. they even co-opted a 'pictures of cute dogs' group :(

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html

There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads. ...

The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure. But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.

that tactic isn't all that dissimilar from the ones used by those twitter accounts that boost their follow counts by "parodying" people like frank ocean and kanye west then turn into ads for sneakers or whatever

Yo I heard paperboy died
Did he?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgRlY6r331g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja8uu2h113k