Social Media Takes Over the News

Until recently, social media sites sometimes drove traffic to news sites (via links posted by their users). But now social media sites are displaying news content within their own apps. This changes the dynamics totally. Is news media becoming like wire services, wonders Ezra Klein:

“Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News…The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don’t control and didn’t design.”

This transformation is just a reflection of the ground reality:

“Twitter and Instagram and Vine and Snapchat and especially Facebook are larger concentrations of people than virtually any conceivable publication, and these people are clicking, tapping, scrolling and sharing more vigorously than people ever did on websites.”

John Herrman points out that news companies that can “work out advertising partnerships with these platforms will be able to extract not just attention but money”. But would this result in “lowest-common-denominator sameness” of all news content? No, says Herrman because “shareable CONTENT that all platforms respect” is just a “platonic ideal”!

Klein does raise a valid concern that social media sites will end up controlling the format in which new stories are presented. Also, are Facebook/ Instagram/ Twitter policies even compatible with editorial guidelines? And since social media sites make all their money via ads, Herrman asks:

“What does a journalistic church-state negotiation look like when the advertising side is not a valuable partner against whom editorial keeps some leverage (in the form of its control over audience) but an entity that is both vastly larger and owns both audience and the means of producing revenue?”

And then there’s the power of social media sites to decide which news sites they partner with. Will that end up killing off the less popular but still necessary-for-a-free-society news sites altogether?

Yogi Berra famously said, “The future ain't what it used to be”. That future is coming, ready or not, good or bad, says Herrman:

“The transition from web to apps, from sprawling web publishing to platform partnerships and captured competition, should it proceed long enough, is more profound than any of these people are prepared to deal with or, for now, acknowledge.”

And as well everything else in capitalism, Herrman says this transformation will be “a huge opportunity for someone. Just… maybe not you”. Ouch!