
Social media's effect on journalism is greater than shift from print to digital - ptrptr
http://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform-press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php
======
Lxr
More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting
facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay
with our attention and our data rather than our money.

~~~
matt4077
The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ,
Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong.

There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish
stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the
role of journalism in a democracy.

Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the
decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call.
Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism.

Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless
automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be
arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their
experience in that process.

In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money,
quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always
dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that
sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat
because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are
actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why
they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for:
single-article micro payments.

~~~
acdha
It wasn't perfect in the past but it feels like you're arguing against a straw
man more than anything else. Nobody seriously claims that news was ever pure
objectivity but in the past newspapers had far more money to support
investigative journalism and, with so many more of them, that meant local
issues which are increasingly ignored. Sure, every outlet had a bias but there
was a key difference: a newspaper is an easily sued entity - no question of
identity, local presence, etc. – and far more importantly the need to maintain
subscribers in the general community placed a limit on how extreme any
mainstream journal could get, especially in the news coverage as opposed to
editorials. The WSJ might have been reliably Republican in its editorial
endorsements but most liberals respected its business reporting, the NYT was
roughly the same, especially on foreign coverage, from the center-left instead
of center-right, etc. because they would check sources, print names and
verifiable facts, etc. even if it was no more nobly intended than defense
against a libel suit. Again, not perfect but there were multiple levels where
there was a check on bad behavior for any major player. There were scandals
like Jayson Blair but they were scandalous because they were rare and lead to
people being fired.

In contrast the modern web of news sites are all chasing the same ad dollars
and the barriers to entry are orders of magnitude lower. They get paid by the
page view and don't need to be in a specific area, so the old check of needing
to keep subscribers is gone and there's even a profit motive for running more
outlandish claims. If someone were motivated to sue, it'd be an expensive and
often international slog and the likely outcome even if successful is that a
nearly asset-free company would fold before inevitably being replaced.

~~~
matt4077
I think you're making a good argument for the rise of fringe publications like
infowars or (to keep the balance) motherjones.com.

But what I was trying to dispel was the myth that previously well-regarded
institutions like the WSJ and NYT changed for the worse.

I'm pretty sure the Blair scandal (someone completely making up interviews
etc.) would play out very much the same today as it did in 2003. I also cannot
agree with the idea that these specific institutions are "publishing
outlandish claims" any more than they previously did.

Note that these newspapers' finances are still very much structured as they
ever were. The NYT makes 70% of its income from subscriptions (
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/new-
york-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/new-york-
times-q4-earnings.html?_r=0)) and the number is probably higher for the WSJ,
which started its paywall much earlier and is more stringent in its
application. Digital advertisement makes up only 10% of its income.

~~~
metaphorm
motherjones is a long-running progressive/political literary magazine. it
started as an old media, printed on paper publication in 1976 and completely
precedes the trend of internet based conspiracy peddlers like infowars. the
fact that you're conflating the two "for balance" (as you say) is a serious
error and it undermines your credibility.

~~~
matt4077
Indeed–sorry. I've rarely ever gone to either of these places and seemed to
remember some hyperbolic headlines from the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some cringe-worthy publications on the left as well,
but it's certainly more common on the right.

~~~
metaphorm
there are cringe worthy publications on the left. Huffington Post, The Young
Turks, Jezebel, etc. They are hyper-partisan, screechy, shrill, unreasonable,
gossipy, (nearly) empty spectacles in their own right but I don't know of a
single one of them that is even halfway as far off the deep end of
"motherfuckin lizard people aliens are running satanic child sex slave rings
out of a pizza restaurant" that the infowars style conspiracy stuff gets into.

and Mother Jones is nowhere even on that axis. it's a higher quality
publication with a deliberate (and publicly announced) editorial bias.

~~~
Ygg2

        >I don't know of a single one of them that is even halfway as far off the deep end of "motherfuckin lizard 
    

Give them like three years. I'm sure we'll see something like "Trump is
secretly a Russian child smuggler".

------
losteverything
Report is by a journalism school.

Their ecosystem has always believed they are more important than they are. A
person can earn a living within their ecosystem and never leave it.

This report is an example of how their ecosystem thrives on talking about
their ecosystem.

Yet I remain even more certain we are much better off now than the Cronkite
days when it was 3 networks, a few newspapers and national enquirer.

~~~
ForRealsies
Journalists in large media markets (NYC, DC, etc.) can literally not make a
living with their paltry salaries. It necessitates that they come from rich
families (ex: Anderson Cooper) to be supported. It is classism. The middle
class choose to become doctors/engineers instead.

~~~
losteverything
Help me understand this

If I am a peraon who writes words that get published, at the daily news or NYT
for example, I get paid, right? How much? 50k a year?

Or are some of the words published written by someone else not in their
payroll.

~~~
cookiecaper
I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published
pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops.

There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a
writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only
is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much.

Most "journalists" today are starving artist types.

I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet,
we all have _direct_ access to the news. We're no longer dependent on
someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need
people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do
that ourselves with aggregation platforms.

The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable
career.

------
_rpd
> Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target content. They have not
> wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both cost and the perception
> that humans would be biased. However, the nuances of journalism require
> editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach.

Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power.
Could they develop this without splitting into Blue Facebook and Red Facebook
like the television news networks?

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
They already have though. My friends seem to draw political posts in their
feeds from two different pools, depending on the user's affiliation.

~~~
_rpd
Interesting. I wonder if they maintain two different editorial teams.

~~~
cookiecaper
They don't. In fact, as a response to the "fake news" hysteria, they've gone
to a completely centralized "Trending News" bar, so it's identical across the
country. [0] This is _after_ they got in trouble last year for intentionally
stopping the propagation of stories that painted conservatives positively. [1]

[0] [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-
updates-...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-to-
trending/) [1] [https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-
sup...](https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-
conser-1775461006)

------
debt
"Social media" calls into question the entire current consumer tech landscape.
What's the point of being always connected if the things we have access to or
are connected to is garbage?

~~~
Mahn
To be perfectly blunt though, social media is just a medium, what is garbage
is what people are putting it in there. Being always connected just amplifies
what was already there. So, I would argue that what social media really calls
into question is our very society.

------
wu-ikkyu
Social media cuts out the journalist middleman and makes everyone a
broadcasting journalist.

Print journalism was (relatively) one to many.

Social media is many to many.

~~~
pdelbarba
It does, but at the same time also cuts out whatever was left of journalistic
ethics as well.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
Perhaps, though it seems corporate profits have been prioritized over
journalistic ethics in the mass media since at least the 1890s with the yellow
journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer.

------
golergka
Why are people saying that social media is the problem? As far as I see,
social media are just more effective at satisfying people's wants in their
information consumption.

It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes
their echo chamber.

~~~
mirimir
It's because social media can deliver bullshit in a highly specific and
targeted way. Only so many cable channels are possible.

~~~
golergka
It can deliver anything in a highly specific and targeted way.

It delivers bullshit because that's what people want the most.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Not just bullshit, but also psychological manipulation in a highly specific
and targeted way.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, that's a particularly insidious form of bullshit.

I could have said "fnords", but that's become rather dated.

------
ThomPete
The only thing that changed was the readers illusion of newspapers somehow
being the source of truth and objecticity.

People used to believe that journalism was about reporing facts and objective
accounts of what was going on.

In reality the newspapers who used to position themselves as objective never
where, they were however mainstream.

Thanks to the internet people are now seeing the reality of journalism which
is that there are many different perspectives on any subject or put another
way. The post-modernists were right all along.

Journalism has never been as factual as it is today it's just that people are
uneasy about the reality that different facts can be used to create different
angels to the same story.

The only piece of objectivity there is in any story is the event itself.
"Plane went down", "Man committed of murder", "Trump won the presidency" once
you step outside of these basic facts it's mostly up to interpretation. The
whys, the hows, all based on interpretation.

Thanks to social media and then fact that you can't just get away with
claiming one interpretation when there are more is what make social media
disruptive, not to journalism but to the way we understand journalism.

------
hectorr
This makes sense. Social companies now own eyeballs. They sell eyeballs to
advertisers, something legacy media used to do. But legacy media didn't own
eyeballs through the magic of journalism, it owned them through massive
monopolies in print (local) and telecom (national). Journalists don't like to
talk about this, because it hurts their ego.

------
sbardle
In the seventeenth century, media shifted from manuscripts to print. Now print
has shifted to digital, but with the rise of Social some of the earlier
dynamics of manuscript circulation are coming back into play, e.g "scribal
communities" can be compared with "social media communities". What this means,
I've no idea, but it could lead to a further polarising of political opinion
as social media communities solidify and cross-community dialogue disappears.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Back in the day we used to call this "web 2.0"

------
rpazyaquian
Pretty sure the latter was necessary for the former.

