Big commercial online news providers are shedding staff in large numbers as social media firms swallow advertising revenues
In December 2016, Jonah Peretti, the charismatic founder of the digital news and entertainment company BuzzFeed, penned his annual memo to his 1,400 staff. The memo outlined some of Peretti’s frustrations after that year’s US presidential election had revealed how much shoddy and misleading content was circulating online. His own news site had revealed some of the biggest stories in the “fake news” scandal that engulfed Facebook. But Peretti’s remedy was not regulation or chastisement of Facebook, but a concern that the old guard of so-called “legacy media” were also to blame.
“Media companies have been much too slow to shift to digital,” he wrote. “They’ve clung to print and broadcast, even when it was clear audiences are moving elsewhere. This means the budgets for quality journalism are focused on the wrong places, creating a void that is filled by the cheapest possible content, often from questionable sources.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2G7gqE7
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