Is journalism dying?

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

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

― passé aggresif (darraghmac), Tuesday, October 3, 2017 7:56 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/08/media/cnn-correction-email-story/index.html

is it standard practice to report the contents of an email that the reporter him/herself has not seen? particularly when the sourcing is anonymous?

it is standard practice among the gullible, the negligent, and the unscrupulous.

So it took 15 years from the start of this thread, but...

"America's local news has reached its death spiral phase."

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/new-york-daily-news.php

Tronc's dumpster fire management style is not emblematic

Seattle’s local papers are a single daily owned and editorialized by a rich Republican fuckstick I refuse to give any money to, an alt biweekly that has laid off all but one actual news reporter but has room for Dan Savage, and a non-alternative weekly that has refocused its coverage on…the suburbs or something. Fuck all of them, I’m supporting my neighborhood blogger on Patreon.

Anyway nobody seems to believe in the importance of journalists more than journalists. But The News has never stopped being one of the many machines that turns anger and anxiety into money.

Like how much honestly happens on a given day that I have to know about the next day, there’s nothing to be done about any of it.

Not all journalism is daily journalism. Reportage and think-pieces in monthly or quarterly magazines is journalism, too. For democracy to work, people have to have some kind of trusted source for what is happening beyond their front door.

So to follow up on my last thread revive, a friend and I have both quit our jobs to start this thing -- compassknox.com -- to cover gubmint, politics and business in our fine city. We have low overhead and we're doing subscription only, so we figure we only need a couple of thousand subscribers to be sustainable. (In a metro area of well over half a million people.) Reaction from our first week of offering subscriptions has been good -- especially because we aren't even publishing til September, so right now people are just signing up because they know us or like the idea. Here's hoping.

Oh, here's a clickable link: https://compassknox.com/

Best wishes~ hope you can pay the bills ASAP

You’re probably the one who looks like an ilx user right

yeah that other guy looks like one of those guys with money or one of those guys who knows people with money, smart move getting hooked up with him

that's great tipsy, best of luck

I enjoyed the "son of" bio openers

omfg the dichotomy of your accents in the video

I fully support this but I no longer live in Knoxville

Thanks all! Yeah, I love the mix of accents too. We gotta have at least one real East Tennessean.

best of luck tipsy! :)

Great initiative tipsy, hope you rack up the subscribers soon!

go tipsy go!! local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

i was fucking astonished at how bad local tv news is now in Knoxville. WBIR literally just runs packages from random Gannett affiliates. if it's vaguely near Knoxville that's a bonus but it totally doesn't have to be. craft beer festival in, i dunno, california? WBIR has you covered! the only actual local news they do on the reg is sports and weather. the last 10 minutes of the show. it's kind of unbelievable!

Yeah, the local media landscape is pretty dismal. It's not like it was ever great, but there are so many fewer actual reporters in town than there were 10 or 20 years ago (even though there are tens of thousands more people living here).

local news has been absolutely decimated by decades of bad corporate policy (fuck gannett forever) and recent trends toward focusing only on the phony metric known as "trending"

I've talked to some people at the local (Gannett) daily, and they don't even pretend otherwise. It is literally all about generating clicks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/business/media/mic-staff-layoff.html

I wrote a piece for them once, and it was a good experience overall. Hopefully Kyle and everyone else lands okay.

36,000sf of 1WTC for this