Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable. – Joseph Krutz (writer)
Introduction
I had the opportunity to attend Moore’s lecture that was organized by London Media Democracy group. Moore is a Director and Senior Research Fellow at London School of Economics. He mainly spoke about Facebook and the power it has to communicate news and hold our attention. With 1.18 billion active users, it could be said that Facebook has transformed from a technology company to an outright media company. We’ve seen Zuckerberg denying the rumours that Facebook was influencing the elections, and since then, Facebook started to deploy journalists and partnering up with media institutions to produce credible content and fight against fake news and clickbait.
Martin Moore’s Talk
It is paradoxical to notice how young people get their news from an organization that doesn’t employ any journalists. But this is about to change, as Facebook is rolling out Journalism Project, a service that is focused on partnering up with news organizations, publishers and educators to create a healthier news ecosystem. Facebook’s efforts to tackle fake news might be a bit late considering the events that have been happening over the last 18 months. Various subprojects are introduced that have the ability to lift Facebook and demonstrate quality news reporting. One project called Instant Articles has certainly made a difference on how we read the news. Because the articles are uploaded to Facebook, it is possible to retrieve them in lightning speed and thus, offer a seamless reading experience for the people. It could be said that transparency, is the biggest New Year’s resolution Facebook is making.
Despite the efforts, this isn’t good news for the smaller, independent news outlets that are big advocates for truth and treat is as the highest news value. Smaller news outlets that use the longread format don’t necessarily have the possibility to display ads to collect funds and are forced to introduce paywalls into their content. Very quick textual analysis on Longread‘s site indicates that they want to build a community around quality journalism. Instead of subscribers or readers, it’s friends when a donation popup is displayed. It seems that journalists are using their best instrument to convert and get new users to support their cause: words.
Discussion
It could be firmly said that technology companies like Facebook are now media companies, that have gained a tremendeously big status in the attention economy. These business drive the agenda of other businesses. Because millenials are no longer going to the news organizations’ sites (and thus, doesn’t see any adverts on those sites), the organizations have to treat Facebook as a primary platform for their news. Likewise, to remain as “sticky” as Facebook is, it needs content for people to come back to their site. This is not the only business model for social media channels to succeed in the media industry: Linkedin still uses human editors to cultivate and preserve a specfic community in its site, and people that post on Medium are motivated to collaborate and write credible stories.
UPDATE (19.01): Medium has since laid off 50 employees and shut down two of its offices.
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