What 2,000 job cuts tell us: the free market kills digital journalism | Media

IIn December 2016, Jonah Peretti, the charismatic founder of digital news and entertainment company BuzzFeed, wrote his annual memo to its 1,400 employees. The memo highlighted some of Peretti's frustrations after this year's US presidential election revealed how mediocre and misleading content was circulating online. His own news site had revealed some of the biggest stories in the "false news" scandal that had engulfed Facebook. But Peretti's cure was not a regulation or a punishment of Facebook, but a fear that the old guard of what was called the "traditional media" was also to blame:

"Media companies have been far too slow to go digital," he wrote. "They clung to print and broadcast, although it was clear that the audience is moving elsewhere. This means that budgets for quality journalism are concentrated on the wrong places, creating a vacuum filled with the least expensive content, often from questionable sources. "

In New York, in January 2019, it is a brutal cold. The winter has arrived with fierce consequences for digital publishers, including BuzzFeed. In two weeks, about 2,100 jobs were lost in the media, many of them disappearing from purely digital publishers. BuzzFeed layoffs accounted for 15% of the total workforce, representing a loss of about 220 jobs in all departments, including its widely-admired newsroom in New York. Friday, Vice, another media company badociated with rapid growth, announced the dismissal of 10% of its workforce. Last month, Verizon phone company, owner of Huffington Post and Yahoo, removed 800 people in its media division. In the United Kingdom, Pool, a women's website launched in 2015 by radio presenter Lauren Laverne and the editor-in-chief of Sam Baker magazine, went into liquidation; 24 journalists threatened with dismissal.

Many of these layoffs took place in real time on Twitter when journalists reported how they were released and often in cruel and inane-cruel ways. Vice journalists were aware of the layoffs and sometimes had their email accounts closed before the company told them that they were among the victims.

Job losses in the media are not unusual. In the newspapers, especially in the local and regional press in the United States, the last decade has been catastrophic. Between 2008 and 2017, the number of jobs in newsrooms in American newspapers dropped by 45% to 39,000. All jobs in the United States, including television and radio, declined 23% overall. Of the layoffs registered so far in 2019, McClatchy and Gannett Newspapers have announced early retirement and layoffs. But the polar vortex that engulfed digital publishing, although relatively small by comparison, has left the industry and journalists in trouble. The long and slow decline of newspapers has been well documented, with advertisers and readers increasingly turning to digital platforms. But for companies that have been praised for understanding the social web faster than traditional media, faltering is a signal too difficult for many media companies to consider. Many of us conclude that the commercial Internet makes journalism profitable much more difficult, if not impossible.

Media consumption habits on the mobile social web have changed dramatically. In the United States, about 68% of adults get at least some of their news on social networks, and the majority of them cite Facebook as their main source. Facebook's valuation now exceeds 470 billion dollars. Google's market value went from $ 200 billion in 2012 to nearly $ 800 billion. Google and Facebook, together, dominate the digital advertising market. In the same week that BuzzFeed announced its job losses, Facebook announced record sales of nearly $ 17 billion for the last quarter of 2018. Despite a year of frightening advertising, accused of contributing to genocide in Myanmar to confidentiality, Facebook's business seems stronger than ever.

The main mistake of most digital publishers was to imagine that platform companies, including Google and Facebook, had every interest in helping them to sustain their business. The amount of data collected and controlled by the major platforms allows them to offer much more effective advertising than any publisher, and the cost-effectiveness of online content is rigged against those who want to run a newsroom even low resources, with experienced journalists.

Peretti's note to staff after the layoffs was instructive on what would be needed to be sustainable:

"We can create profitable media companies above Facebook and YouTube," he writes, "but only when the content we produce is of high quality, with enormous size and relatively low production costs."

Whatever the content, it is unlikely to be an in-depth investigative report, which is neither cheap to produce nor, in general, something attractive "on a large scale". If BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital publishers who have suffered despite the boom of the advertising market can not make the social network work, it is likely that those who do will not depend on the publicity.

It is also likely that this year's job losses are just the beginning of a new depression in the publishing industry. In areas such as the United States, which is almost entirely dependent on the free market to hold the powerful in power for 70 years, the lack of well-funded and abundant civic or public media is particularly acute. In what appears to be an attempt to apply a sticky bandage to an amputation, Facebook and Google are now funding local efforts to increase the number of journalists and resources in newsrooms through programs such as Report for America.

Between them, the digital duopoly spends $ 600 million over the next three years supporting journalism. But the involvement of big techs in serious reporting is both ethically delicate and up to now largely ineffective.

The deliberate intent of Google, Facebook, Twitter and others not to empty the advertising pool supporting journalism was not deliberate, but they did not care whether publishers survived or failed. BuzzFeed had an almost symbiotic relationship with Facebook, collaborating on projects and helping to promote its tools to other publishers. However, reports suggest that after adjusting its algorithm to downgrade news, Facebook's traffic to BuzzFeed and other publisher sites has dropped significantly.

Many people tout tips for what might work for the media, whether it's about podcasts or newsletters, or having a very small niche audience, or even templates. 39, membership more and more popular or new types of subscription. And there are real examples of different models, especially in non-profit sectors and niches. the New York Times and Washington Post (which operates under the protection of Amazon's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos) are large, well-funded and both have expanded their newsroom while others are shrinking. Both have been successful in billing subscriptions to readers, but very few organizations can replicate their brands or resources.

The future of journalism will generally be smaller and more difficult in the short term and remains uncertain in the long run. However, the problem is now so clear that even the most advanced digital thinkers can understand it: a free digital market for journalism does not work.

Emily Bell is Professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism School in New York.