The New York Times announced this week it is negotiating with Facebook, the company that's taking the links out of viral news, about a deal to share revenue.
Produced for March 26, 2015, but can run a few days after. More info: newsroom.free103point9.org, newsroom.wgxc.org
The print journalism business lost revenue from many sources in its transition to digital, online news. Craigslist, the common wisdom goes, sucked the classified ad business out of newspapers. Now another online force, even larger, Facebook, is threatening to do more of the same. The New York Times reported this week that Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies, including The New York Times, about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than users clicking a link to an external site. Bloggers these days are having problems with Facebook: they write an article that goes viral on Facebook, but no one clicks on their site, because all the information is on Facebook. Without clicks on a site, ad revenues plummet. So The Timesâ announcement has a canât-beat-âem-so-join-âem quality to it. âSuch a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them,â The Times article says. The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic are said to be the first partners willing to post their reporting to Facebook in exchange for a cut of their ad revenue. Others are pushing back. âSeveral employees of The Guardian, for example, have informally suggested to colleagues at other publications that publishers should band together to negotiate deals that work for the whole industry, and should retain control of their own advertising, whether content is hosted on Facebook or not, a person with knowledge of the discussions said,â The Times reported. Will Oremus at Slate summed up the two sides: âCollectively, news media would be foolish to put their fate in Facebookâs hands. Individually, however, they might be foolish not to.â
Facebook vs. the news media 20150326
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March 26, 2015
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