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GUEST BLOG—By
Emily Bell, Emily Bell is Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at
Columbia Journalism School, and Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media 2015-16
at the The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at
the University of Cambridge.
“...it is fair to say that unless
social platforms return a great deal more money back to the source, producing
news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of
capitalism...”--Emily Bell.
Something really dramatic is happening
to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost
without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and
debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the
past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are
seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video,
artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are
seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our
publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of
many.
Social media
hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed
political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry,
retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to
the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities
for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of
contingent existential risks.
Journalism
is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but
one of central interest to citizens.
The internet
and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work, while at the same
time helping to make the business of publishing journalism an uneconomic
venture.
Two
significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention
to:
First, news
publishers have lost control over distribution.
Social media
and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if
they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which
are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and
digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their
presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against
it.
Second, the
inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.
The largest
of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon,
and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging
messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling
who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.
There is a
far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in
the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality
in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market
dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies
are failing.
The mobile
revolution is behind much of this.
Because of
the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of
things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.
The design
and capabilities of our phones (thank you, Apple) favor apps, which foster
different behavior. Google did recent research through its Android platform
that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only
use four or five of those apps every day, and of those apps we use every day,
the most significant chunk of our time is spent on a social media app. And at
the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform.
The majority
of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users
regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research
Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider
Facebook a source of news.
So let’s
recap:
People are
increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
They do it
mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as
Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
The
competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for
platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your
users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that
information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
The
competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the
apocalypse”—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in
Microsoft)—are engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies,
platforms, and even ideologies will win.
In the last
year, journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found
themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.
It is very
good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that
distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.
In the past
year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice,
BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook launched
Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all
publishers in April. 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.
It is very
good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that
distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.
At the same
time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly into apps and new
systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile audiences, Apple announced it
would allow ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store.
In other
words, if as a publisher your alternative to going onto a distributed platform
is to make money through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block
all ads and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within
platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook, are
largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the already
very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might be getting
independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course, one might add that
publishers had it coming from weighing down their pages with intrusive ads
nobody wanted in the first place.
There are
three alternatives for commercial publishers.
One is to
push even more of your journalism straight to an app like Facebook and its
Instant Articles where ad blocking is not impossible but harder than at the
browser level. As one publisher put it to me, “We look at the amount we might
make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to
Facebook, we would still be better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on
the revenue and traffic from one distributor, are very high.
The second
option is to build other businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms.
Accept that seeking a vast audience through other platforms is not only not
helping you but actively damaging your journalism, so move to a measurement of
audience engagement rather than scale.
Membership
or subscription are most commonly considered in this context. Ironically, the
prerequisites for this are having a strong brand identity that subscribers feel
affinity towards. In a world where content is highly distributed, this is far
harder to achieve than when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in
the handful of cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up
the shortfall in advertising.
The third
is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all,
so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or
“sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has grown to
nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US. In fact,
digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like Vice, have disrupted
the failing publishing model by essentially becoming advertising agencies—which
are themselves in danger of failing. What I mean by this is that they deal
directly with advertisers, they make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we
see scattered all over our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all
those people who have previously “liked” or shared other material from that
publisher.
The logical
answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest in their own
destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app has to be compliant
with the distribution standards of others in order to work. And investing in
maintaining your own presence comes at a time when advertising (particularly in
print) is under pressure, and online advertising is not growing either. The
critical balance between destination and distribution is probably the hardest
investment decision traditional publishers have to make right now.
Publishers
are reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four times
the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go “all in” on
distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work
on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can imagine we will see news
companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity, and even
advertising departments, and delegating it all to third-party platforms in an
attempt to stay afloat.
This 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 everyday, 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.
For this to
happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in
this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not
set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In
fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering
success.
To be
sustainable, news and journalism companies will need to radically alter their
cost base.
One of the
criticisms thus far leveled against these companies is that they have
cherry-picked the profitable parts of the publishing process and sidestepped
the more expensive business of actually creating good journalism. If the
current nascent experiments such as Instant Articles lead to a more integrated
relationship with journalism, it is possible that we will see a more
significant shift of production costs follow, particularly around technology
and advertising sales.
The
reintermediation of information, which once looked as though it was going to be
fully democratized by the progress of the open Web, is likely to make the
mechanisms for funding journalism worse before they get better. Looking at the
prospects for mobile advertising and the aggressive growth targets Apple, Facebook,
Google, and the rest have to meet to satisfy Wall Street, it is fair to say
that unless social platforms return a great deal more money back to the source,
producing news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of
capitalism.
To be
sustainable, news and journalism companies will need to radically alter their
cost base. It seems most likely that the next wave of news media companies will
be fashioned around a studio model of managing different stories, talents, and
products across a vast range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens,
posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule
rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned in
favor of hyperdistribution. The distinction between platforms and publishers
will melt completely.
Even if you
think of yourself as a technology company, you are making critical decisions
about everything from access to platforms, the shape of journalism or speech,
the inclusion or banning of certain content, the acceptance or rejection of
various publishers.
What happens
to the current class of news publishers is a much less important question than
what kind of a news and information society we want to create and how can we
help shape this.
SOURCE: From a speech Emily Bell gave at
Cambridge last week titled “The End of the News as We Know It: How Facebook
Swallowed Journalism,” which appeared March 10, 2016: http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php
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