Vice News Shutdown and The Role of Social Media in News Recommendation: Why Social Media Has Failed to Grow in the Musk Era
Vice is slashing staff and closing its flagship broadcast program, Vice News Tonight. The news is shutting down. Vox recently laid off nearly 10% of its staff. February was the month in which the site went out of business again.
The turmoil caused by an historic slowdown in digital advertising is sparking worries among staff at online media companies about further and possibly deeper cuts beyond the mass layoffs and abrupt closures over the last few months.
The shift from social media that Smith mentions is another pain point for the industry, as chaos engulfs Twitter under Elon Musk, and other legacy social media platforms, like Facebook, lose their luster for news sites.
In other words, news outlets used social media to reach people. But the tech companies pocketed most of the advertising dollars, something that has become even more pronounced as a pullback in ad spending wallops both the media and tech sectors.
Facebook stopped promoting stories. TikTok feeds have barely any original news reporting. And Twitter, by all accounts, is now a hostile environment under Musk.
Outlets craft stories for maximum social amplification with headlines and topics that can be easily juiced by algorithms. They’re all chasing that singular reward that social media recommendation systems provide: clicks.
That means it’s going to favor one way or the other. And we might say, ‘you know what? That’s not the best way to report the news.
The engagement of users with misinformation has increased since Musk took over, according to a fact-checking organization.
In a staff memo announcing the closure of BuzzFeed News, Jonah Peretti, the company’s CEO, said social media platforms being bad partners is one of the reasons why the news division was shutting down.
The Most stupid thing your enemy has ever thought and said about the Web, Facebook, Twitter and Google 2.0 media news (with an updated version coming soon)
“It rewards people for feeding into predictable narratives and telling people what they want to hear, punishes them for breaking from the pack,” he said. “It’s the most stupid thing your enemy has ever thought and said.”
That refers to the modern internet: mediated through large platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter that are awash with user-generated content and that help people navigate the web. Social media sites, search engines, and online marketplaces like Amazon are all part of Web 2.0.
There are clues as to what trends are speeding up according to a journalism professor at the City University of New York.
Newsletters for niche audiences are rising in popularity. There are also more paid subscriptions, instead of ad-dependent news sites, as well as communities around nerdy topics on platforms like Reddit and Discord.
To operate at the scale of Silicon Valley and venture capital is not required. “We can get back to a scale of small because of all of these tools.”
This shift from large social media platforms to smaller and smaller communities is going to continue, and with it, the big Web 2.0 companies will cede power, he said.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/28/1172599212/web-buzzfeed-vice-gawker-facebook-twitter-media-news
In The Beginning of Two News Networks: Mark Zuckerberg and the Fate of the News. The Story of the First 50 Years of the Washington Post
It took 150 years after Gutenberg for anyone to invent a newspaper. I think we’re talking about decades, maybe even generations, before we figure out this next stage,” Jarvis said.
Peretti was the leader of the Huffington Post, which had key figures such as Bannon and Breitbart. Smith himself hired right-winger Benny Johnson. The capitol was occupied on January 6, 2021, by a memewrangler known as Baked Alaska. The rise of Barack Obama could be attributed to the influence of digital power. Who knew the viral juice of silly listicles would be weaponized by Donald Trump?
Smith is correct about the power of tech platforms based in Silicon Valley, though his story of two East Coast news organizations is only a small part of it. Geeks, not newsies, were the actual engineers of virality. In the closing pages of Traffic, Smith admits his well-founded fears that his narrative—despite compelling characters and its capture of a moment when journalists began chasing traffic with the fervor once devoted to chasing scoops—might be like Tom Stoppard’s play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which focused on peripheral characters in Shakespeare’s masterpiece who were prisoners to forces beyond their control. In that sense Mark Zuckerberg is Traffic’s Hamlet, glimpsed only fleetingly, but firmly in control of the fate of the news outlets that depended on his links.