News publishers learn to adapt or be forgotten
The Trade Desk
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With the demise of BuzzFeed News, publishers face another moment of reckoning with Big Tech
By Damian Fowler
When BuzzFeed shut down its namesake news division last week, it signaled the end of an era for a publication designed for the age of social media. Launched in 2012, the digital upstart quickly built a stellar newsroom, even winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting, and it looked set to revitalize journalism in the digital age.
But last week’s announcement told another story, familiar to many publications whose fortunes have been tied to the fickle and fast-changing world of social media trends. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti admitted as much when he dropped the bad news, saying he was “slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.”
While many across the media landscape reacted with sadness about BuzzFeed News’ demise, others seized the moment to challenge the dominance of the Big Tech platforms, such as Alphabet’s Google and Meta’s Facebook, which have become the de facto gateway to news for many consumers. Publishers argue they don’t receive fair compensation for their content, which is used to drive ad revenue for the platforms. However, Google says it delivers significant value and funding to news organizations, while Facebook says its platform helps drive revenue and subscribers.
“The fact that a savvy, nationally focused digital publication like BuzzFeed News has now been outlasted by newspapers should tell anyone that our economic model for funding digital news is completely broken,” says Matt Pearce, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and the president of Media Guild of the West, a local union of The NewsGuild-CWA, representing journalists and media workers across California.
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Why NPR’s decision to leave Twitter signals a new era for news publishing
By Travis Clark
Some news outlets have finally had enough of Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Earlier this month, National Public Radio (NPR) was the first major news organization to announce that it would no longer post new content to its feeds after the Musk-owned social platform labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media.” Other nonprofit media organizations like PBS and CBC have since followed after being slapped with similar labels.
“Is this going to hurt us in terms of traffic, engagement, audience? The numbers told us ‘no,’” NPR Vice President and Executive Editor Terence Samuel told The Current. “It made the decision easy for us.”
As some news organizations rethink how they use Twitter, or if they use it at all, it doesn’t necessarily mean social platforms — and tech in general — have lost their power. But it could mean the news media is entering a new era of collaboration with the internet.
The Current spoke with NPR’s Samuel about changes at Twitter, the emergence of creative artificial intelligence (AI), and publishers’ endless and increasingly complex quest to reach their audiences.
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