Entertainment beat: Facebook Is Killing Comedy

Comedy Web sites have been “scaling back, shutting down or restructuring their business model away from original online content,” reports Sarah Aswell at Splitsider.com. What’s killing online comedy? Facebook. Aswell spoke to longtime comedy writer Matt Klinman, who explained that once Facebook stopped linking out and sending readers to other sites, it became “editor and our boss. They decide what is successful and what isn’t successful via seemingly meaningless metrics.” Facebook, Klinman warns, “has created a centrally designed Internet.” This especially hurts comedy, Klinman says, because Facebook has flattened content into one delivery system so everything looks the same: “There’s a reason that Mad magazine looks different from Vanity Fair. They need to convey a different aesthetic and a different tone for their content to really pop. Facebook is the great de-contextualizer.”