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.
Yeah - I read through this a couple of times, and I feel the headline is a bit misleading.
I reckon this problem has been around longer than Facebook. As the second professor put it, news orgs aren’t in the news business - they’re in the attention-grabbing business.
It’s been many, many years (decades) since I remember my old man sitting down and reading a newspaper front to back, then back to front, on a weekend. He read every inch - news, sports, classifieds, public notices. When those things eventually started shifting to digital - in isolation - newspapers (and magazines) started feeling it.
Facebook is simply the newest face they can apply to the problem.