The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.
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Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
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Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”
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In the past, the deaths of news organizations have jeopardized the prospect of a safe, well-informed, civically-engaged community
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One 2014 paper found a substantial drop-off in civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver from 2008 to 2009, after both cities saw the closure of longstanding daily newspapers
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The problem is that Zuckerberg lays out concrete ideas about how to build community on Facebook, how to encourage civic engagement, and how to improve the quality and inclusiveness of discourse—but he bakes in an assumption that news, which has always been subsidized by the advertising dollars his company now commands, will continue to feed into Facebook’s system at little to no cost to Facebook
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In some ways, Zuckerberg is building a news organization without journalists. The uncomfortable truth for journalists, though, is that Facebook is much better at community building in the digital age than news organizations are.
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for context: The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun claims that its circulation of 9 million copies daily makes it the largest in the world
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you can see how Zuckerberg is continuing to push Facebook’s hands-off approach to editorial responsibility. Facebook is outsourcing its decision-making power about what’s in your News Feed. Instead of the way a newspaper editor decides what’s on the front page, the user will decide.
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“For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum,” Zuckerberg wrote. Which makes some sense. There are all kinds of issues with an American company imposing its cultural values uniformly on 1.9 billion individuals all over the world.
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In the United States, the combined daily prime time average viewership for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was 3.1 million people in 2015,
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and now also to act as unpaid editors, volunteering to teach Facebook’s algorithmic editors how and when to surface the content Facebook does not pay for.
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Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it. All of this is the news industry’s problem; not Zuckerberg’s. But it’s also a problem for anyone who believes in and relies on quality journalism to make sense of the world.
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Zuckerberg doesn’t want Facebook to kill journalism as we know it. He really, really doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t.