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NY Times: "All the News That Mark Zuckerberg Sees Fit To Print"?
theodp writes Two years ago, Politico caught Mark Zuckerberg's soon-to-be launched FWD.us PAC boasting how its wealthy tech exec backers would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts. Now, the NY Times is reporting that Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook, citing a source who said the Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal. Facebook declined to comment on specific discussions with publishers, but noted it had provided features to help publishers get better traction on Facebook, including tools unveiled in December that let them target their articles to specific groups of Facebook users. The new plan, notes the Times, is championed by Chris Cox, the top lieutenant to Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and a "major supporter" of FWD.us. Exploring Facebook's wooing of the media giants, the Christian Science Monitor asks if social media will control the future of news, citing concerns expressed by Fusion's Felix Salmon, who warns that as news sites sacrifice their brands to reach a wider audience, their incentives for accuracy and editorial judgment will disappear.
There was a brief moment in time (sorry Stephen) when I thought the internet would break up the gate keepers. That moment has passed.
"their incentives for accuracy and editorial judgment will disappear."
Have there ever been any?????
Why can't anyone else. If you have Rupert Murdoch owning as much media as he does to control the political discourse, seems kinda how things are going, may as well have someone who is willing to toss a bit more diversity into the mix and allow more social dissemination of news. I think Mark Zuckerberg is in an interesting position to put a counterpoint to the newscorp media spinmachine and others like it. Puts News organizations on more equal footing and ultimatly accountable to their subscribers vs just us taking whatever they feed us.
So yea he sees it fit, probably better to have a counter point to the current mass media machine. TV News is slowly becoming irrelevant in the age of near instant information. Twitter, Facebook news travels fast (AKA Viral) TV news usually reports on it at the end of the day OR sometimes days later by then everyone already knows the details of whatever news they are reporting on. IMO the weather is about the only interesting thing about the news these days.
The NYT already has a website, and as bad as it is, it still is ten times better than Facebook? Basically the advertisement for Facebook should read:
Do you have no idea how to make your own web page - even using squarespace?
Can you not figure out how to mass email your friends?
Are you clueless about how to find free free games on the internet?
Does the idea of signing up for a blogging site scare you?
Does the laborious process of signing into and out of websites bore you?
Does the idea of locking yourself into a relationship with a company excite you - particularly because all your friends use the same company and they force outsiders to have an account before they let them see your stuff?
Then FACEBOOK IS FOR YOU For the low low price of your giving up privacy, you too can simulate the basic internet skills that every single American should be taught in High School.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Seriously - the only people I know who are still on Facebook daily are soccer moms busy shuttling kids seven different ways. That's a pretty powerful demographic in terms of household purchasing power, but to say that it's key to media domination...misses the fact that there's Twitter and whole webs of social media that people over 25 don't even see. (I "borrow" my kids tablets and phones once in a while just to see how far they and their classmates are off mainstream social media grid.)
So like AOL back in the day?
I can guarantee you that any media which starts hosting their stuff in Facebook will be immediately deemed a useless source of information and blocked.
I have most of my browsers set to block anything from Facebook, because I'm tired of the sheer number of web pages which have their crap embedded.
Screw off and die, Zuckerfuck. I trust you and Facebook not at all.
How he's managed to convince actual news companies to let him in the door I have no idea. That just sounds like idiots being hoodwinked by assholes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"who warns that as news sites sacrifice their brands to reach a wider audience, their incentives for accuracy and editorial judgment will disappear"
Wow, and this quote is on a Dice owned property?
AOL owns Huff Post.
Same as Facebook and NYT, and no doubt the same slant on the "news"
Newspaper execs have proven over and over again that they don't get the new digital media. If they sign up for this it'll be just more proof that they still don't get it. Further diminishing their own brand to prop up the declining Facebook one.
Not that I'm a fan of news meda slipping even further down the drain, but TFA talks about editorial judgement and accuracy like it's not already massively broken for all the reasons he states. There's nothing to suggest that Facebook would actually make the situation worse, or better, than it already is.
The problem is that we don't want anyone to control the news with money, and by proxy, control the integrity of the news. However, the money to keep it going has to come from somewhere and we don't seem to trust anyone. It will always be in peril until a neutral source for revenue can be found.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
.
Anyone want to wager how long it will be before Microsoft ports Office to Facebook?
"At least Zuckerberg does not fucking pretend to be a reputable media publication with journalistic standard"
Now if he'd just stop pretending to be an honest business man who has his user's interests at heart we'd be getting somewhere.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I wish there were a rant+1 mod for this.
The primary function of government is protection of property rights. Early anarcho-capitalist Lysander Spooner described all legitimate government as a mutual property insurance company. Guys like Gates, and now Zuckerberg, should be taxed on their net assets, not on their actions (ie: not on income, capital gains, sales, value added, inheritance, etc...) as that is the closest thing to a property insurance premium.
Seastead this.
The Amazon tycoon owns the Washington Post.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
There was a brief moment in time (sorry Stephen) when I thought the internet would break up the gate keepers. That moment has passed.
The gate keeper serves a much needed function.
Searching Google News for the Greenways crash returns 10,846 hits as of 1:45 PM EDT.
You can be very, very, good at this sort of thing and still be overwhelmed by the numbers and the difficulty of getting concise, timely, and meaningful results.
If I am, god forbid, reduced to paying cellular rates for data, what I want is a targeted selection of stories in depth and a quick overview from MSN News.
The gatekeeper can negotiate for access to content that would otherwise not be available outside the paywall. He may like Nerflix have the resources needed to underwrite the production of original content.
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Internet -- not so much social media, but that somewhat too -- already control the news, and I expect this to continue without break.
Unless you are willing to term "news" the vapid, nipple-slip and corporate-fellatio pap that FOX, CNN, MSNBC, the NYT and their other editorially constipated brethren feed us.
The consumers of those sources get immensely slanted and dumbed down takes on nothing but things carefully picked to feed their preconceptions as the oligarchy has served them up, or meaningless filler.
I am not saying that the "list of ten amazing... whatever" posts are worthy, nor popular dullard watering holes like Drudge; they're as bad as or worse than anything the media ever put in front of us, but the Internet is much more that that; there's just no way the news can compete with the many people who are truly interested in a subject and go to lengths to specifically cover it -- not on level of detail, not on level of accuracy, and not on interactivity. Even those media sites with open comment sections (and no, that doesn't include the ones with facebook-driven forums) fail to measure up, because it's all commenters talking to commenters -- there's very rarely any engagement at all from the author of the story, explaining the whys and wherefores due to having generated the story as fast as possible, every thought about it completely abandoned in favor of the next story.
Compounding their problem, traditional media is embracing the very worst habit of lowest common denominator clickbait sites, short videos that are difficult to comment on, much more difficult to quote, and generally of massively less worth than an actual written report or opinion.
There's another factor -- I've found that the very best reporting seems to consistently come from sources that lean towards the least commercial approach. The presence of ads seems to be an incredibly consistent flag that the content will be lower quality. The more ads, the more that seems to be the case. Stories-as-ads are a serious red flag, content-wise. You can still find worthy content in comments, but the stories from the source... they really deserve a healthy dose of skepticism.
Yes, I'm very negative about the media. That's the result of being exposed to it for fifty years. BENGAZI! DRUGZEZ! TERRORMISTS! PERVERTAGE! and of course there's that old standby: publish something relatively sane, then give equal time to a fucktarded, worthless, rationale- and evidence-free counter view. That's always helpful. Not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have seen enough half-truths and outright untrue "news stories" on Facebook that I no longer rely on it for a source of news. Not to mention that I don't want to be blasted by ads, which is FB's sole source of revenue for the stockholders.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Gamers, hell! Wait until you try criticizing in any way those who politicize the weather.