
Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism - panarky
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-understand-journalism/559424/?single_page=true
======
contourtrails
I don't have much sympathy for major news organizations because they are
publishing opinions more than they are publishing breaking news based on
investigative journalism.

Of course I can't blame them, because the industry's economic reality is that
a certain number of articles must be published every day, and opinions are
just much more plentiful and easier to source than breaking news.

Yet the broader reality is that Facebook has no obligation to society at large
to deliver these opinion pieces to the masses. In fact by doing so, Facebook
(and the internet more broadly) contributes to social unrest and polarization
by constantly feeding people opinions that reinforce their own.

Facebook should be reducing the visibility of such content on its network.

Certainly high quality opinions exist, and they do have value. And
intellectual content usually holds at least some kernel if opinion. But the
problem is the pile-on, the crowd-fury, the group-think that always seems to
accompany and eventually overpower those few reasoned opinions that exist.

The root problem is the avalanche of opinions that assaults our rationality
whenever anything happens in the world. We need to slow things down to reduce
the group-think, to give people room to breathe and the reasoned opinions to
be heard and not shouted down.

Hence my belief that Facebook should reduce its bandwidth for opinion
("news").

~~~
tlb
I prefer high-quality opinions, such as found in the Atlantic, Economist, and
New Yorker, over "breaking news" which is usually just a copy-paste of
someone's press release. Opinions have far more intellectual content. You
can't have intellectual content without some point of view, and once you
understand the POVs of some authors and publications, you can see around
things you disagree with.

It's true that there are lots of low-quality opinions too, but there is more
than enough high-quality opinionated content to fill your day reading. There's
no reason to read "breaking news". If something's important, a weekly
publication will soon enough have something thoughtful to say about it.

~~~
siruncledrew
Opinions are good to read sometimes, but neither "opinion pieces" nor
copy/pasted "breaking news" seem to qualify as high-standards journalism
(especially from organizational outlets). That's the kind of content I would
expect to find on Reddit or HN from user comments, not something a 100+ year
old business like the Economist or the Atlantic would produce.

Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need
to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also
sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what
used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is
(subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text
articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites
look like the reverse of that nowadays.

~~~
eterm
This is why I like the Guardian, because they clearly mark the difference
between their News section and their Opinion section, "Comment is free", and
they keep the news part relatively opinion-free, subject to certain bias on
what they choose to report.

------
wccrawford
>Couldn’t Facebook pay publishers directly by licensing their stories or
programming? “Yeah,” Zuckerberg said, “I’m not sure that makes sense.”

How in the world would having Facebook pick which publishers to pay end up
with better news? They've going to pay the ones that people already want to
see and show it to those same people. But now those publishers are further
incentivized to cater to that crowd, if that's even possible.

There's no way that Facebook ends up being an actual source of truth for news.

People want to point to FB and say "Hey, they're spreading the wrong news!"
But it's other people who are actually pushing the buttons to spread that
news, not Facebook.

~~~
deelowe
> How in the world would having Facebook pick which publishers to pay end up
> with better news?

It wouldn't. It's just the solution that most closely models their historical
distribution models which their entire business is built around (and has been
for so long, they know no other way to do it).

------
Karishma1234
To understand journalism and journalists please read Nissim Nicholas Taleb's
book Skin in the Game.

There was a time when people who had passion to bring knowledge before the
world worked to achieve that and invented "journalism". That rare breed of
people exists today and actually flourishes because of Youtube, Google and
Facebook.

There is another lot who called themselves "journalists" and worked hard to
get the privileges associated with it without actually having passion for
bringing knowledge to people. Privileges => access to corridors of power,
swinging political opinion, pimping for political patrons or simply making
money.

Gawker is a good example. They tried to bully someone and got bullied into
extinction themselves.

When I speak to journalists at NYT or Time, I realise that they have developed
this sense of entitlement where they think they are doing great job where as
independent bloggers and youtubers are shit because they dont have
journalistic credentials.

It is actually opposite. Big media houses have failed us but the independent
bloggers are the ones leading the torch helped by Google, Facebook etc.

~~~
justin66
Those are some nice prejudices you've got there, but this statement:

 _There is another lot who called themselves "journalists" and worked hard to
get the privileges associated with it without actually having passion for
bringing knowledge to people. Privileges => access to corridors of power,
swinging political opinion, pimping for political patrons or simply making
money._

is silly and poorly thought out. The number of journalists who have any
proximity to "corridors of power" or political patrons or any sort of power is
so obviously, vanishingly small that it's not representative of the profession
as a whole. And you might not think journalists are good enough at bringing
knowledge to people, but if you think they don't have a passion for it, you
just haven't known a lot of journalists.

 _Skin in the Game_ will be the first Taleb book I haven't read, but he's
turned into such a tedious, self-important bore.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _have any proximity to "corridors of power" or political patrons or any sort
> of power_

This is a picky comment, but I think it's important to distinguish "proximity
to power" from "holding power". There are a lot of journalists with proximity
to power, some of them doing a serious disservice to the public because of
that proximity. A false story like Iraqi yellowcake uranium was peddled by
high-profile, respectable journalists because they had and relied on proximity
to power. But it didn't _give_ them power, it just made them a mouthpiece.

Which doesn't make the preceding commenter right, that's still wildly off-
base. I just wanted to note that the journalists close to power rarely have
it, and the journalists with real power are rarer and tend to lack proximity
to political power. They do exist - Murrow and Woodward for good, Hearst for
ill - but most of them only have it for a moment.

(And yes, _Skin in the Game_ is unbearable. Reading the pre-release excerpts
felt like hiking through egomaniacal mud, and I'm not likely to try the whole
book.)

~~~
justin66
Those are all good points. I think the main thing to keep in mind is that even
today, the vast majority of journalists are _not_ working for a nationally
prominent paper or on national TV. A lot of journalism is just local
reporting, and those people can have their issues, but being corrupt or drunk
on power isn't normally one of them.

One thing that's ironic is that Nassim Taleb doesn't appear to understand that
the kind of reporters who seek out Nassim Taleb aren't representative of the
entire profession.

------
cbhl
I still can't believe Buzzfeed is now considered a top source of investigative
journalism.

Funded by the ad revenue from clickbait, quizzes, memes, and listicles, it was
actually able to afford to pay for the long-form content that you used to
expect only from, say, National Geographic or the Atlantic.

------
lumberjack
>As any journalist can tell you, the best answer to the question “what
happened?” is not why don’t you ask a bunch of your friends what they think,
organize their views along a spectrum, and then decide where to plant
yourself.

Yet this is the propaganda tool de jour. The perception of public sentiment is
very important in shaping peoples opinions, irrespective of the facts. A fact
today might be interpreted in some way, the same fact in two years might be
interpreted in a completely different manner. Perception is even more
important than facts, because facts are actually just claims by authority
figures. If you spread a certain sentiment that a certain authority figure is
untrustworthy (or vice versa) you can "amend facts" in the minds of the
electorate.

------
Mononokay
I think he understands it exactly, personally. Just because he's upsetting
_The Atlantic_ doesn't mean he's not understanding it.

------
Lendal
I couldn't read the article, because they want me to whitelist Facebook
trackers.

I don't use Facebook, I don't have a Facebook account, and I never have had
one. Why do they want me to whitelist Facebook trackers? No.

Last time I'll ever attempt to read The Atlantic. F __k them. If the news isn
't covered by NYT or the Post (the only newspapers I pay for) then it isn't
worth knowing about, I guess.

------
panarky
Facebook shouldn't be in the journalism business at all.

Journalism requires reporters, fact checkers and editors united by a culture
that cares about accuracy and truth.

Facebook is the polar opposite of this. People sharing shit on Facebook is a
nutrient-rich environment for both ignoramuses and bad actors pushing
agitprop.

Facebook can't clean up their cesspool of disinformation by spreading
algorithmic special sauce on top of it.

~~~
tlb
Clearly it's impossible to detect agitprop with 100% accuracy. But I think
they could eliminate 80% of the bad stuff with straightforward filtering. HN
eliminates the great majority of the agitprop and outrage porn submitted with
very simple heuristics. Human flagging eliminates most of the rest, though
sometimes too late.

Eliminating 80% would improve the world's psyche considerably.

~~~
Bartweiss
This entire topic feels like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation.

What could Facebook do to improve news quality without censorship? It could
just go back to what it _already did_ with trending stories, before they fired
their entire human-review team and then immediately started promoting
objectively-false claims. It could even keep the algorithmic choices, and just
pay for one media-savvy person per shift to skim the headlines and delete
anything blatantly stupid.

------
agitator
I get the vibe the Zuckerberg and Facebook don't really know what to do about
the news situation.

I find their promises of "we promise to only feed you real news" dishonest.
Isn't the whole premise behind news that it's information aggregated and
broken down by a person. That makes it inherently biased no matter how hard a
person tries to keep bias out of it.... it's just part of it. So under what
metrics will they determine that information isn't biased? It just doesn't
make sense to me.

It feels like a catch 22. Facebook makes a lot of money by posting ads for
news and funneling traffic to other sites. But users leave when their feeds
are garbage or they feel like Facebook isn't doing anything to protect them.
Lets just tell both sides we will solve the problem, but never actually
explain how we will do that.

------
talltimtom
It is very important to Facebook that the news companies keep reporting the
news either for free or to a broad group of paying costumers because all that
content and the discussions of them feed his platform.

Facebook will never pay for content. And you can’t really help but laugh at
all the papers who bent over backwards to make sure they had a “social media
precense” all they did was move their communities to Facebook for free and now
they can’t cut the ties of providing free content to favebook because that
would cut the ties to their readers.

------
ryandrake
Here’s what I see when I visit the article:

Ad for TheAtlantic app

Ad for personal loan

Headline

Share and Tweet buttons

Newsletter signup

Some article text

Car ad

Some article text

Obtrusive ad fly out over content!

Related stories

Some article text

Car ad

Some article text

Share and Tweet buttons

More ads and pormotional content

More ads

More ads all the way to the bottom

If this is what journalism is, I’m glad someone out there is trying something
different, not saying FB’s version is necessarily better.

------
panarky
_the best answer to the question “what happened?” is not "why don’t you ask a
bunch of your friends what they think, organize their views along a spectrum,
and then decide where to plant yourself"_

Is the purpose of news and journalism to establish what happened?

Or why it happened?

Or what's likely to happen next because it happened?

Or what's important to pay attention to in the first place?

~~~
_rpd
> “The institutional values of most really good media companies should
> transcend any individual opinion,” ... argued Joseph Kahn, the managing
> editor of The New York Times

This seems to be the central dispute. Facebook promotes the opinions of
friends and family over articles on nytimes.com. I don't think nytimes would
care so much but for the fact that so many people are in fact paying more
attention to the opinions of friends and family. More than just the lost
advertising revenue, this is an existential issue for nytimes and similar
content creators.

~~~
wrs
It's an existential issue for _American society_. Journalism has a function
that has evolved in symbiosis with civil society. Friends and family don't
fulfill that function, unless you have a very large family made of
journalists.

Zuckerberg seems to realize this, given the comment about public funding, but
that is just an unrealistic throwaway line in the current moment. I don't much
like the idea that you can make billions by destroying the support for a
pillar of civilization and then say that's not your problem to solve.

------
patmcc
>>>He runs a media company that has—with Google’s help—dominated the vast
majority of digital ad dollars and eviscerated the journalism industry’s
business model

Oh, bullshit. Google and Facebook didn't kill journalism, "journalism" decided
not to complete and thought people would keep paying similar ad rates for
something objectively worse.

And whining about how Facebook doesn't pay to license journalist content? In
my "trending" section I can click to see a one sentence summary and then click
through to the news site. It's not on facebook, except for that one sentence
(which might be written by a user? Not clear to me) and a link. What would
they pay for?

------
GreeniFi
I’ve got a really good idea as to how to run a country:

1\. Establish a dominant arbiter of fact. 2\. Place as it’s head a decidedly
odd person with some very curious ideas. 3\. Ensure via voting rules that he
is accountable to no-one. 4\. Allow it a natural monopoly from which it can
extract massive rents. 5\. Give it surveillance powers unparalleled in human
existence.

Idi Amin, Gaddafi, Chairman Mao, would have and did kill for this type of
power.

Instead we have “Zuck”. What a schmuck.

~~~
dang
Please don't do overwrought political rhetoric here. It lowers the signal-
noise ratio, nearly always escalates to flamewar, and isn't necessary to make
your substantive point.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
GreeniFi
I appreciate your desire to maintain a civil tone - I’m usually decorous. But
what in points 1-5 above is incorrect or overwrought? And what in the
comparison?

~~~
dang
Ok, let's take a look. First of all, when you bring in Idi Amin, Gaddafi, and
Mao, all you're doing is ratcheting up inflammation while reducing
information—hence what I said about signal/noise. It's just a way of saying
"Yuck", like listing a bunch of foods you hate, except with supervillains.
You've now limited the range of possible responses to either "omg you said
super-evil" or "that's not super-evil", neither of which is ever interesting,
and both of which lead to flamewars.

Grandiose phrases like "unparalleled in human existence" similarly lower
signal-noise ratio, because they turn up the volume without adding
information.

The "schmuck" thing is name-calling, which the site guidelines ask you not to
do. Ditto for the "decidedly odd person" swipe, which is a personal attack. We
can argue about whether "Zuck" deserves better, but the community certainly
does.

Beyond all that, what is the content of the post? You haven't presented any
argument about "how to run a country". It's really just rhetoric. I agree with
you—most of us do, I'm sure—that the things you listed can have negative
consequences in the political sphere. But what those actually are are hard to
pin down, and your comment hasn't said anything thoughtful about them.

~~~
GreeniFi
1\. Your point about signal and noise is accepted in principle. 2\. However,
the relational database which FB has built is “unparalleled in human history”
in its scope for surveilling the world. 3\. The dictators I name would
undoubtedly have been very satisfied to use it. 4\. Schmuck is name-calling.
But as far as schmuck means contemptible, it’s true. In the race to the bottom
to build a low friction, high addiction monopoly social network, Facebook and
Zuckerberg are the undisputed kings of the jungle.

When the signal is obfuscated by a massive PR and lobbying exercise, then
sometimes cutting through that noise to call a spade a spade - or in this case
a Zuck a schmuck, is indeed the correct response. I hope this is not a
flamewar, but instead see it as my pointing out that metaphor and comparison
are rhetorical devices to draw attention to wider truths, and I think that’s
fair.

