This is one Weird trick and it is being done by both BuzzFeed and Gawker

The Vice News Network Shutdown: Digital Advertising in the Age of Crowdfunding and Digital Disassembly: The Case of Vice News Tonight

Vice is slashing staff and closing its flagship broadcast program, Vice News Tonight. There is a news organization shutting down. Vox recently laid off nearly 10% of its staff. In February, the gossip site went out of business again.

The turmoil caused by an historic slowdown in digital advertising is sparking worries among staff at online media companies about further and possibly deeper cuts beyond the mass layoffs and abrupt closures over the last few months.

Ben Smith, a former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, believes that the current moment is the result of a massive shift away from social media and a tough economy. Readers and viewers want to understand the world.

In other words, news outlets used social media to reach people. But the tech companies pocketed most of the advertising dollars, something that has become even more pronounced as a pullback in ad spending wallops both the media and tech sectors.

News stories are not being promoted on Facebook. Tik Tok feeds only have original news reporting. All accounts say that it is now a hostile environment under Musk.

Artifact, an app developed by the co-founders of IG to distribute quality online news and weed out clickbait, was one of the sites that has seen growth in recent years.

What is the Best Way to Do the News? Why Social Media Platforms Are Breaking, Not News Feeds: A Commentary of Jeff Jarvis

That means that it’s going to favor extreme right-wing groups. We might just say, ‘you know what?’ That’s not the best way to do the news,'” Radsch said.

One recent study by Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization, found that user engagement with so-called superspreaders of misinformation increased 44% on the platform since Musk took over.

The CEO of BuzzFeed said in a staff memo that the reason the news division was shutting down was because of social media platforms being bad partners.

He said that it rewards people who feed into predictable narratives and tells people what they want to hear, as punishment for breaking from the pack. It’s the stupidest thing your enemy has thought and said.

To many observers, the current moment of the digital media industry getting rickety and top social media sites rapidly degrading in quality could be ushering in the end of Web 2.0.

There are clues in what trends are accelerating, according to Jeff Jarvis, a media critic and a journalism professor at the City University of New York.

For example, specialized newsletters and podcasts for niche audiences are rising in popularity, he said. There are more paid subscribers to the community of nerds on platforms like Reddit, as well as to news sites which are not dependent on ads.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/28/1172599212/web-buzzfeed-vice-gawker-facebook-twitter-media-news

Silicon Valley has a lot to offer: Traffic’s Hamlet in the West Coast, but it hasn’t stopped there in the last 150 years

The scale of mass media, Silicon Valley and venture capital isn’t needed by us, said Jarvis. “Because all of these tools exist, we can get back to a human scale of small.”

With the move from big social media platforms to smaller and smaller communities, the companies that make Web 2.0 will cede control, he said.

It took 150 years after Gutenberg for anyone to come up with a newspaper. I think we’re talking about decades, maybe even generations, before we figure out this next stage,” Jarvis said.

Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart were key figures in the Huffington Post, which Peretti helped lead even while launching BuzzFeed. Smith himself hired right-winger Benny Johnson. Another early BuzzFeeder, a meme-wrangler known as Baked Alaska, was among those storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Digital power once was celebrated as a force behind Barack Obama’s rise. Who knew that Donald Trump would use silly listicles and exploding watermelons as a way to make his supporters hate him?

Nonetheless, Smith’s story of two East Coast news organizations is only a slice of a bigger phenomenon—about the power of tech platforms based in Silicon Valley. Geeks, not newsies, were the actual engineers of virality. In the closing pages of Traffic, Smith admits his well-founded fears that his narrative—despite compelling characters and its capture of a moment when journalists began chasing traffic with the fervor once devoted to chasing scoops—might be like Tom Stoppard’s play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which focused on peripheral characters in Shakespeare’s masterpiece who were prisoners to forces beyond their control. There was a fleeting glimpse of the man as Traffic’s Hamlet, but he was in total control of the news outlets that depended on his links.