Try and get past the fact that this is sort-of about Facebook. Because it’s more about the demise of news than it is about Facebook, specifically.
news organisations were never in the news business, Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at QUT, said.
"They were in the attention-attraction business.
"In another era, if you were an advertiser, a newspaper was a great place to be.
“But now there are just much better places to be.”
The moment news moved online, and was “unbundled” from classifieds, sports results, movie listings, weather reports, celebrity gossip, and all the other reasons people bought newspapers or watched evening TV bulletins, the news business model was dead.
News by itself was never profitable, Professor Bruns said.
"Then advertising moved somewhere else.
“This was always going to happen via Facebook or other platforms.”
It’s a really fascinating read. We can all agree that independent journalism is valuable in our society, but ultimately, most of us don’t so much seek news out as much as we encounter news as we go about our day.
I’m sure the TL;DR bot is about to entirely miss the nuance of the article. I recommend reading the whole thing.
It’s one of the reasons I subscribe to a couple of news outlets, I value the news and someone needs to pay. Most people have forgotten that they used to “buy” newspapers, after all, everything is free on the internet.
The problem with paying for news is that 99% of the time it involves an account and logging in to view the articles. I don’t want the news I chose to read to be further monetised by the business, advertisers or data brokers, and I don’t want the news org changing what they present to me, or report, based on some analysis of subscriber attention and interaction.
That leaves the < 1% who don’t put their articles behind a paywall — even then, the surveillance capitalism of the banking and finance sector means that my donation transaction itself will be sold to data brokers, and from it the news I read can be profiled.
I click on every single article on the front page into a new tab. I then read (some of) the tabs as I get a minute here or there through the day. I still get the news I want to read, there’s nothing to analyze because they don’t know which articles I spent more than two seconds on.
(Yes, I know there are ways to measure time on a page, but I don’t frequent such sites)