As news publications drift away from their long-established print products and concentrate on web-based income, recent developments could put a great deal of control over journalism into the hands of social media powerhouses such as Facebook and Snapchat.
Essentially, as media companies flail around in their bid to establish a presence online, the temptation to turn over delivery of their news content to a third party is growing.
But the impact on a free press and democratic institutions could be dramatic. In particular, Facebook’s role in our lives could grow dramatically.
In the past year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving access to brands like Vice, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the (London) Daily Mail, according to Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Facebook launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all publishers in April, a potential game-changer in the news business.
Apple and Google quickly followed suit, launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete stories about events.
These well-funded companies can offer valuable platforms for news that will reach millions of people. But these tech giants are not necessarily interested in recreating a digital version of traditional newspaper advertising, with a smartphone screen littered with ads.
For example, the Apple App Store provides enormous access to readers but Apple has announced that it will provide ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store.
Bell, who is also a visiting professor at Cambridge University gave a speech there that was titled, “The End of the News as We Know It: How Facebook Swallowed Journalism.”
Here is a portion of that speech delivered last week, with text published by Columbia Journalism Review.
This approach is a high-risk strategy: You lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.
With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online every day, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.
In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.
There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.
We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.
We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
