Art by Jeff Drew
As with any toxic relationship, the possibility of a breakup sparks feelings of terror — and maybe a little bit of a relief. That’s the spot that Facebook has put the news business in.
In January, the social media behemoth announced it would again alter its news feed algorithm to show users even more posts from friends and family, and a lot fewer from media outlets.
The move isn’t surprising. Ever since the 2016 election, Facebook’s been under siege for creating a habitat where fake news stories flourished. Their executives were dragged before Congress last year to testify about how they sold ads to Russians who wanted to influence the presidential election. It’s simply easier to get out of the news business altogether.
But for the many news outlets that have come to rely on Facebook funneling readers to their sites, the impact of a separation sounds catastrophic.
“Facebook is breaking up with news,” BuzzFeed proclaimed.
When a giant like Facebook takes a step, the resulting quake can cause an entire industry to crumble.
Consumers, meanwhile, have grimaced as their favorite media outlets have stooped to sensational headlines to lure Facebook’s web traffic. They’ve become disillusioned by the flood of hoaxes and conspiracy theories spreading on the site.
A Knight Foundation/Gallup poll released last month revealed that only a third of Americans had a positive view of the media. About 57 percent said that using algorithms to determine which news stories readers see was a major problem for democracy. Two-thirds believed the media being “dramatic or too sensational in order to attract more readers or viewers” was a major problem.
Now, sites that rely on Facebook’s algorithm watch the floor drop out from under them every time the algorithm is changed — all while Facebook continues to gobble up chunks of print advertising revenue.
It’s put media outlets in a hell of a quandary: It sure seems like Facebook is killing journalism. But can journalism survive without it?
“Traffic is such a drug right now,” says Sean Robinson, a 53-year-old investigative reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune. “The industry is hurting so bad that it’s really hard to detox.”
When Facebook launched its “News Feed” in 2006, it didn’t have anything to do with news. Originally, it was a list of personalized updates from your friends.
But in 2009, Facebook introduced its iconic “like” button. Soon, instead of showing posts in chronological order, the news feed began showing you the popular posts first.
That made all the difference.
Facebook didn’t invent going viral, but its algorithm amplified it. Well-liked posts soared. Unpopular posts simply went unseen.
Google had an algorithm too. So did YouTube.
Journalists were given a new directive: If you wanted readers to see your stories, you had to play by the algorithm’s rules. Mystery formulas had replaced the stodgy newspaper editor as the gatekeeper of information.
When the McClatchy Company — a chain that owns 31 daily papers — launched its reinvention strategy last year, getting Facebook traffic was central.
“Facebook has allowed us to get our journalism out to hundreds of millions more people,” says McClatchy’s vice president of news Tim Grieve, a fast-talking former Politico editor. “It has forced us, and all publishers, to sharpen our game to make sure we’re writing stories that connect with people.”
640x480.indd
With digital ad rates tied to web traffic, the incentives in the modern media landscape could be especially perverse: Write short, write lots. Pluck heartstrings or stoke fury.
In short, be more like Upworthy. A site filled with multi-sentence, baiting headlines, Upworthy begged you to click by promising that you would be shocked, outraged or inspired — but not telling you why. (One example: “His first 4 sentences are interesting. The 5th blew my mind. And made me a little sick.”)
By November 2013, Upworthy was pulling in 88 million unique visitors a month. With Facebook’s help, the formula spread.
The McClatchy-owned Bellingham Herald headlined a short crime story about the arrest of a carjacker this way: “Four people, two cars, one gun. What happens next?”
Even magazines like Newsweek began pumping out articles like, “President still taking hair loss drug even after research revealed link to erectile dysfunction and depression.”
Newsweek’s publisher went beyond clickbait; the magazine was actually buying traffic through pirated video sites, allegedly engaging in ad fraud.
Mathew Ingram, who covers digital media for Columbia Journalism Review, says such tactics might increase traffic but readers hate it.
“Short-term you can make a certain amount of money,” Ingram says. “Long-term you’re basically setting fire to your brand.”
One strategy throughout the industry is to downplay the location of a story: Readers in other markets are more likely to click if they don’t know it happened thousands of miles away.
Grieve, the McClatchy executive, says that he doesn’t ever want to sensationalize a story. But he also says that “internet and social media are noisy places,” and papers have to sell their stories aggressively.
“If you’re writing stories that aren’t getting read,” Grieve says, “you’re not a journalist — you’re keeping a journal.”
640x480.indd
Plenty of media outlets have tried to grow business using the Facebook news feed algorithm. They quickly got a nasty surprise: That foundation can collapse in an instant.
As the news feed became choked with links to Upworthy and its horde of imitators, the social network declared war on clickbait. It tweaked its algorithms, which proved catastrophic for Upworthy.
“It keeps changing,” Ingram says. “Even if the algorithm was bad in some way, at least if it’s predictable, you could adapt.”
A 2014 Time magazine story estimated that two to three global algorithm tweaks on Facebook were happening every week.
Six years ago, for example, KHQ, a TV news station in Spokane, Washington, told readers they’d have “an ENTIRE day here on FB dedicated to positive local news” if the post got liked 500 times. It worked and KHQ followed through with a puppy-picture-laden “Feel Good Friday!!!”
Under the current Facebook algorithm that tactic could get their page demoted. So could using shameless “you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next” style phrases.
Much of the time, Facebook and Google don’t announce their shifts. Media outlets often have had to reverse-engineer the changes, before issuing new commands to their troops in the field.
“Oh, they changed their algorithm again?” Robinson says. “Oh, what is it today, coach?”
A pattern emerged. Step 1: Media outlets reinvent themselves for Facebook. Step 2: Facebook makes that reinvention obsolete. Publishers leaped at the chance to publish “Instant Articles” directly on Facebook, only to find that the algorithm soon changed, rewarding videos more than posts. So publishers like Mic.com, Mashable and Vice News “pivoted to video,” laying off dozens of journalists in the process.
“Then Facebook said they weren’t as interested in video anymore,” Ingram says. “Classic bait and switch.”
Which brings us to the latest string of announcements: The news feed, Zuckerberg announced last month, had skewed too far in the direction of posts from national media pages and too far away from personal posts from friends and family.
Facebook was going back to its roots.
News organizations who’d dumped a lot of money into eye-catching pre-recorded video would suffer the most under the latest algorithm changes, Facebook’s News Feed VP Adam Mosseri told TechCrunch last month, because “video is such a passive experience.”
Even before the announcement, news sites had seen their articles get fewer and fewer hits from Facebook. Last year, Google once again became the biggest referrer of news traffic.
640x480.indd
“Some media outlets saw [Facebook] traffic decline by as much as 30 to 40 percent,” Ingram says. “Everybody knew something was happening, but we didn’t know what.”
It might be easy to mock those who chased the algorithm from one trend to another. But Ingram says many of them didn’t really have a choice.
“You pretty much have to do something with Facebook,” Ingram says. “You have to. It’s like gravity. You can’t avoid it.”
Zuckerberg’s comments that stories that sparked “meaningful social interactions” would do the best on Facebook caused some to scoff.
“For Facebook, it’s bad if you read or watch content without reacting to it on Facebook. Let that sink in for a moment,” tech journalist Joshua Topolsky wrote at The Outline. “This notion is so corrupt it’s almost comical.”
In subsequent announcements, Facebook gave nervous local news outlets some better news: They’d rank local community news outlets higher in the feed than national ones. They were also launching a new section called “Today In,” focusing on local news, beta-testing the concept in select cities.
But in early tests, the site had trouble determining what’s local. Seattle Times’ reporter Joe O’Sullivan noted on Twitter that of the five stories featured in a screenshot of Facebook’s Olympia test, “NONE OF THEM ARE OLYMPIA STORIES. ZERO.”
Some outlets are taking a “wait-and-see” approach to the latest algorithm before making changes.
“It just, more and more, seems like Facebook and news are not super compatible,” says Shan Wang, staff writer at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
At least not for real news. For fake news, Facebook’s been a perfect match.
There was a time Facebook was smug about its impact on the world. The platform fanned popular uprisings during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Iran and Egypt.
“By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible,” Zuckerberg bragged in a 2012 letter to investors under the header, “we hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.”
Facebook certainly has — though not the way it intended.
A BuzzFeed investigation before the 2016 presidential election found that “fake news” performed better on Facebook than stories from outlets like The New York Times. That is another reason why Facebook might be pulling back from news.
“As unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated,” writes Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager for civic engagement, in a Jan. 22 blog post.
A 2016 Dartmouth study found about a fourth of Americans had visited at least one fake-news website between Oct. 7 and Nov.14, 2016 — and Facebook was the primary vector of misinformation. While researchers didn’t find fake news swung the election, the effect has endured.
Donald Trump has played a role. He snatched away the term used to describe hoax websites and wielded it as a blunderbuss against the press, blasting away at any negative reporting as “fake news.”
By last May, a Harvard-Harris poll found that almost two-thirds of voters believed that mainstream news outlets were full of fake news stories.
The danger of fake news isn’t just that we’ll be tricked with bogus claims, it’s that we’ll be pummeled with so many different contradictory stories that the task of trying to sort truth from fiction becomes exhausting.
So you choose your own truth. Or Facebook’s algorithm chooses it for you: inflating your own bubble, protecting you from facts or opinions you might disagree with.
And when it does expose you to views from the other side, it’s most likely going to be the worst examples, the trolls eager to make people mad online, or the infuriating op-ed that all your friends are sharing.
Many of the 3,000 Facebook ads that Russian trolls bought to influence the election weren’t promoting Trump directly. They were inflaming division in American life by focusing on race and religion.
640x480.indd
Facebook has tried to address the fake news problem — hiring fact checkers to examine stories, slapping “disputed” tags on suspect claims, putting counterpoints in related article boxes — but with mixed results.
The Jan. 15 Knight Foundation/Gallup poll found that those surveyed believed that the broader array of news sources made it harder to stay well-informed.
Those who grew up soaking in the brine of social media aren’t necessarily better at sorting truth from fiction.
“Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” Stanford researchers concluded in a 2016 study. More than 80 percent of middle schoolers surveyed didn’t know the difference between sponsored content and a news article.
It’s why groups like Media Literacy Now have successfully pushed legislatures in states like Washington to put media literacy programs in schools.
That includes teaching students how information was being manipulated behind the scenes, says the organization’s president Erin McNeill.
“With Facebook, for example, why am I seeing this story on the top of the page?” she asks. “Is it because it’s the most important story, or is it because of another reason?”
Facebook’s new algorithm threatens to make existing fake news problems even worse, Ingram says. By focusing on friends and family, it could strengthen the filter bubble even further. Rewarding “engagement” can just as easily incentivize the worst aspects of the internet.
You know what’s really good at getting engagement? Hoaxes. Conspiracy theories. Idiots who start fights in comments sections. “Meaningful social interactions” is a hard concept for algorithms to grasp.
“It’s like getting algorithms to filter out porn,” Ingram says. “You and I know it when we see it. [But] algorithms are constantly filtering out photos of women breastfeeding.”
Facebook hasn’t wanted to censor. After it was accused of suppressing conservative news sites in its Trending Topics section in 2016, it fired its human editors. Conspiracy theories continue to show up in Facebook’s Trending Topics.
To determine the quality of news sites, Facebook is rolling out a two-question survey identifying whether users recognize certain media outlets, and whether they find them trustworthy. The problem is that a lot of Facebook users, like Trump, consider The Washington Post and The New York Times to be “fake news.”
The other problem? There are a lot fewer trustworthy news sources out there. And Facebook bears some of the blame for that, too.
It’s not fair, exactly, to say that Facebook killed the alt-weekly in Knoxville, Tennessee. But it probably landed the final blow.
The internet has been killing newspapers for a long time. Why pay a monthly subscription to the Daily Cow, when you can get the milk online for free?
It killed other revenue sources as well. Craigslist cut out classified sections. Online dating killed personal ads. Amazon put many local mom-and-pop advertisers out of business.
Yet Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s longtime alt-weekly, was still turning a slight profit in 2014 when the Scripps Company shut it down. So editor Coury Turczyn and a few other staffers started their own paper.
But in the six months it took to get the Knoxville Mercury off the ground, the market had changed.
“We lost a lot more small-business advertisers than we expected,” Turczyn says. Facebook had captured them.
At one time, alt-weeklies could rake in advertising money by selling cheaper rates and guaranteeing advertisers to hit a younger, hipper, edgier audience. But then Facebook came along. The site let businesses micro-target advertisements at incredibly specific audiences.
Like Google, Facebook tracks you across the web, digging deep into your private messages to figure out whether to sell you beer, running shoes or baby formula.
“You go to Facebook, you can try to pick your audience based on their geographic location, their interests,” Turczyn says. It’s cheaper. It’s easier. And it comes with a report chock-full of stats on who the ad reached.
“Even if it doesn’t result in any sales and foot traffic, it at least has this report,” Turczyn says.
Mercury ad reps would cite examples of businesses who advertised in print and saw their foot traffic double the next day — but the small businesses wouldn’t bite. Attempts to rally reader donations weren’t enough. The Mercury shut down in July.
“It’s just more of the same sad story,” Turczyn says. “It’s a slaughter, there’s no doubt about it.”
Turczyn says two decades of journalism experience hasn’t helped much with the job search. Journalists aren’t what outlets are looking for.
“The single biggest job opening I see consistently is social media manager. Or ‘digital brand manager,’” Turczyn says. “Those are the jobs on the marketplace right now.”
It’s not that nobody’s making massive amounts of money on advertising online. It’s just that only two are: Facebook and Google — and they’re both destroying print advertising.
The decline in print advertising has ravaged the world of alt-weeklies, killing icons like the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Philadelphia City Paper and the Baltimore City Paper.
Dailies keep suffering, too, no matter how prestigious or internet-savvy. The Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia won a Pulitzer last year for reporting on the opioid crisis. It filed for bankruptcy last month. Eleven staffers were cut from The Oregonian on Jan. 31, the same day Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News slashed staff.
The convergence of layoffs with the pressure to get web traffic, Robinson says, influences coverage. When potential traffic numbers are a factor in story selection and you’re short-staffed, you have to make choices. Stories about schools don’t get many clicks. Weird crime stories do.
But as a longtime reporter, Robinson knows that bombshell scoops sometimes begin with mundane reporting. Fail to report on the dull stuff, and you don’t know what you’re missing.
“The media companies want the traffic, the traffic, the traffic,” Robinson says. “The stuff [readers] need to know — but don’t know they need to know — disappears.”
Asked if there’s any reason for optimism, Ingram, at the Columbia Journalism Review, laughs. If you’re not a behemoth like BuzzFeed, he says, your best bet is to be small enough to be supported by die-hard readers.
“If you’re really, really hyper-focused — geographically or on a topic — then you have a chance,” Ingram says. “Your readership will be passionate enough to support you in some way.”
That’s one reason some actually welcome the prospect of less Facebook traffic. Slate’s Will Oremus argues that less news on Facebook would eventually cleanse news of “the toxic incentives of the algorithm on journalism.”
Maybe without a reliance on Facebook clicks, newspapers would once again be able to build trust with their readers.
But even if Facebook suddenly ceased to exist, there are other sites with other algorithms that can drive traffic and shape coverage. As traffic referred by Facebook falls, the focus at McClatchy is shifting. You can optimize your news coverage to appear higher in the Google search results.
“We’re all about Google, again,” Robinson says. “Google, Google, Google.”
A version of this article first appeared in the Inlander. Read more about Isthmus' own social media strategies here.