Sometimes you need to zoom in to see what's happening
It's only Tuesday.
Well, the last 24 hours have been quite the ride for the media industry and media watchers.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
On the morning that the Department of Justice formally sued Google for having an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising, Facebook took another step towards bringing its different companies—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Messenger—all under one roof.
Facebook has been slowly moving in this direction for a little while now. In November, then-chief marketing officer Antonio Lucio explained why all of the different Facebook companies will now have the words “from Facebook” as part of each company’s brand (emphasis mine):
People should know which companies make the products they use. Our main services include the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra. These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
That “shared infrastructure” is a key component to Facebook’s continued march towards end-to-end encryption, which beyond being a pretty difficult feat, would also potentially draw government pushback.
From the New York Times, Jan 2019:
By stitching the apps’ infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg hopes to increase Facebook’s utility and keep users highly engaged inside the company’s ecosystem. That could reduce people’s appetite for rival messaging services, like those offered by Apple and Google. If users can interact more frequently with Facebook’s apps, the company might also be able to increase its advertising business or add new revenue-generating services, the people said.
Fast forward to September of this year, as Facebook is under investigation:
The F.T.C. has not disclosed details of its investigation, but it appears the agency is partly focused on whether Facebook illegally maintained its dominance in social networking through acquisitions. The company has bought more than 80 companies over the last 15 or so years.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
And as Google now has a date in federal court to defend its practices, the Sacramento Bee News Guild took to Twitter to explain how its McClatchy executive team wants to tie journalists’s pay to the number of clicks their stories get.
This is not smart for several reasons.
Obviously, journalists don’t get paid a lot to begin with, and incentivizing folks to get paid for clicks will create a race-to-the-bottom effect. It’s like media companies that stupidly slap a story quota to journalists with the idiotic thinking that more content equals more pageviews, which will get higher ad impressions.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
Seriously, any company that puts a quota on journalism clearly is not in the journalism business but instead is just a glorified marketer. If you want to help your audience be smarter, don’t put quotas on journalists. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that reporters should be sitting on their thumbs; a high metabolism is necessary for any newsroom.)
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
I had a pretty smart editor who used to preach that the click was the original sin of the internet. This seems accurate. It’s also why the web’s infrastructure is terrible: we incentivize companies to monetize through traffic, generated by clicks. That leads to folks gaming the system in several ways. One way: content farms that pump out shitty content.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
Why pump out so much shitty content? Feed the search beast. The better the SEO, the more clicks; for reporters who break news and don’t have a solid SEO function, they wind up losing on all the potential traffic.
And this is a reason why the DOJ and 11 state attorneys general are suing Google.
(I will not write about Jeffrey Toobin allegedly masturbating in front of his colleagues on Zoom.)
So yeah, a pretty big 24 hours in media land.
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The Divynls, “I Touch Myself”
Some interesting links:
For publishers:
Inside the Atlantic’s triumphant and tumultuous run during the coronavirus pandemic (Digiday)
Is Facebook too big to know? The Markup has a plan (and a browser) to wrap its arms around it (Nieman Lab)
Staffers at Bustle Digital Group, which owns Nylon, Mic and Elite Daily, announce intention to unionize (CNN)
NYPost story goes massive on social media despite crackdowns (Axios)
For shady stuff on platforms:
Thousands Of Women Have No Idea A Telegram Network Is Sharing Fake Nude Images Of Them (BuzzFeed)
For shady stuff between government and companies:
Inside Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises (The Verge)
For buyers:
U.S. Ad Economy Expands Again In September, Second Consecutive Month Of Gains (MediaPost)
For media and political analysis:
The stunning extent to which Trumpism is centered among Fox News-watching Republicans (Washington Post)
For TV revolving door:
ViacomCBS Streaming Shakeup: Pluto TV’s Tom Ryan to Head New Global Division, Marc DeBevoise Steps Down (Variety)
Great piece and McClatchy is playing out worse than I feared. I did not even consider that scenario. And I guess Toobin never learned to keep a piece of tape on his camera. Rookie move these days.
The Facebook move is more likely about trying to show that it can't be easily broken apart more than end-to-end encryption. They've been setting groundwork for a while to defend against a suit.