Is social media destroying the news?
Iowe my career in journalism to social media. I didn’t necessarily plan for it to be that way. Prior to arriving at The Denver Post, I worked as a reporter-photographer intern at some small papers and worked for The Associated Press. I thought I’d end up a reporter. A few months after the Rocky Mountain News’ closure in 2009, I arrived here as a digital intern, armed with a Facebook account that I had used since college (when it was for college students only) and a newly minted Twitter account. That summer, with help from our small digital team, I posted news stories to Twitter and resurrected our then-dormant Facebook page.
By the end of that summer, when the news industry was still recovering from the aftershocks of the Great Recession, my supervisors at The Post made efforts necessary to keep me on a few more months, before hiring me full time. They knew social media would be important, but they — and I — had no idea how these new tools would evolve to becoming one of the most dominant ways Americans get their news.
I want to continue working in this industry for several more decades, but the news industry — particularly local news — is being squeezed by tectonic shifts in news consumption habits and the resulting mass migration of revenue from publishers like ours to large technology companies, making my prospects — and those of the news industry — uncertain at best and potentially disastrous.
Today, 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, and 18 percent do so often, according to a 2016 study from the Pew Research Center. Eyewitnesses to breaking news can tweet pictures from scenes, when professional journalists aren’t always present. People who are victims of oppressive regimes can publish text, videos and photos from
the world’s conflict zones instantaneously, bearing witness as citizen journalists and allowing the masses to see and consume history, unfiltered.
For years, we expected that the migration of audiences to digital would mean even greater revenue. While our digital revenues have grown considerably, digital ad revenue has not made up for the sharp declines in print advertising. Increasingly, a digital adsupported model for quality journalism is looking like pure fantasy, unless you can achieve scale. The reality is illustrated if you follow the money. In 2015, Facebook and Google accounted for 75 percent of all new digital advertising dollars. In the first quarter of 2016, an analyst quoted in The New York Times said 85 cents of every new digital ad dollar was going to those two companies. The trend is accelerating, not moderating, leaving all publishers — not just news organizations — to fight over that last 15 cents.
Despite these problems, we in the news business can’t afford to ignore a platform like Facebook, where 44 percent of Americans get news, according to the Pew study. All told, The Post’s Facebook pages have amassed more than 720,000 fans, a number far greater than our largest print subscription base ever was. Content published by our main Facebook page alone frequently reaches 2 million people weekly. Social media accounts for roughly 20 percent of our referral traffic each month, 80 percent of which comes from Facebook.
When people tell me that newspapers — and really, I prefer the term “news organizations” — are irrelevant, I have a simple response: We’re reaching more people than we ever have in our organization’s 125-year history. We don’t have an audience problem; we have a revenue problem.
Our hyper-connectedness also means information spreads faster than ever. It works well when people spread the word about an AMBER alert, but less so when these channels spread unverified claims and hoaxes.
Against this reality, the algorithms that power these social networks incentivize journalists to tilt more toward conflict, emotion and sensationalism over even-handed reporting, risking the reputation of our brand. This dynamic can especially wreak havoc on our politics.
One study from the digital news site Axios recently noted an explosion in partisan news sites in the last quarter century, because “digital technology has made it easier to exploit the political divisions that have always existed.” And: “News sites are financially incentivized to tilt one way or another.”
Instead of exposing us to differing points of view, these human-created algorithms show us more of what we want, playing to our basest instincts. Facebook’s goal is to show you more of what you like, share and comment on. If you enjoy what you see, you’re far more likely to return again … and again. More exposure means more revenue: Facebook’s fourth quarter profit went from $1.56 billion in 2015 to $3.57 billion in 2016. Twitter, long a niche news consumption platform that shows content in reverse chronological order, has dabbled recently with algorithms because it’s facing pressure from Wall Street for growth. The basic premise: Be more like Facebook, and you’ll be successful.
Like me, most social media strategists in the news business know that stories that elicit a strong emotional reaction draw the all-important click on a story. If it feels like those headlines in your feed all sort of look the same, it’s because they do. We know what works. Clicks deliver you, dear reader, to sites that get us the ad revenue that we need to keep the lights on. We’re trapped in this relentless cycle: More click-driven posts, with grabbier headlines, that lead to more clicks, and more ad revenue. It’s often a race to the bottom.
The crisis of journalism is being felt all over, but it’s most acutely being felt at the local level. I have no doubt that great news organizations like The Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are slowly figuring out how to survive in this new world, thanks to a combination of digital subscriptions and the scale that makes digital advertising at least partially worthwhile.
For news organizations in communities like Colorado and Denver, the prospects are far more challenging. This is not limited to newspapers, either. Local television and radio stations are facing their own existential crisis, with fewer people watching or listening to their news programming, which still provides the vast majority of their revenue. Like us, they flock to Facebook — airing their broadcasts, sharing video clips, sharing a livestream.
A recent study from the Media Insight Project showed one interesting finding: People tend to trust articles shared on Facebook more from people than from the news organizations or institutions that share them. It further showed that only 2 in 10 people in the study group could recall the news reporting source accurately after seeing a Facebookstyle post.
If this dynamic bothers you, what can you do? Start by taking control of your media diet. Just like you shouldn’t have only potato chips and soda for dinner, don’t only rely on Facebook for your news consumption, or the handful of Twitter followers you enjoy. Seek out opposing points of view from reputable publications. If you find yourself outraged over a post you’ve seen on Facebook — and I mean this for both liberals and conservatives — pause and ask whether it’s something you can trust.
Facebook is — belatedly — acknowledging its role as a massive player in media, post-election, even if its CEO insists it’s not a media company. Representatives from Facebook are embarking on a national tour to speak to local media organizations after years of working with only the biggest players. It’s a valuable step, and one that we are watching closely. They’re also partnering with fact-checking organizations to flag suspicious content. But the company must do more to elevate the source of information, beyond a small gray link back to a website. Broadly, citizens should demand better from these companies.
Most importantly, support local journalism. I laud the subscription bumps going to the big national players as much as anyone, but the places that need your support more than ever are local journalists. Sign up for a newsletter, donate to a journalism nonprofit, buy a digital, or print, subscription. Digital startups and nonprofits are cropping up in Denver and other communities to try to fill the gap with innovative approaches to the news. But as of now, they are not replacing the accountable reporting being lost. In the end, we get the media we pay for.
What this ultimately comes down to is a battle over your attention. More choices, thanks to digital and social media, means our media world is increasingly fragmented. The economics are challenging by themselves, and the more we understand how social media is changing our views and consumption habits, the better prepared we are to comprehend whether this is a direction that, as a democracy and society, we really want to go.