This particular setup is small potatoes. You want to talk monopoly? Gannett is a far better target (NB: I used to work for Gannett).
Sure, Conde Nast has a high MAU count, but they’re still producing quality journalism. And I fail to see how putting a finger on the scale – driving readers to good stories – is really a problem.
Given current trends in journalism overall, this is corporate overreach, to be sure, but this is a competition for eyeballs that goes all the way back to Twitter and Facebook killing local journalism by training readers to not click through to the original sources, thereby depriving them of ad revenue.
This is simply advocating for further erosion of the industry. Case in point: Gannett was already, 10 years ago, producing generic wire pages for scores of local outlets. One guy in Austin (Adam) read the AP News Digest, and without so much as a budget meeting, we were replicating it nationwide, just cutting stories (usually badly, since the business model at the hub was to hire new grads and pay them shit until they burned out) to fit each paper’s ad stack.
Algorithms Being Manipulated is in no way unique to Advance. This is a red herring. Journalism is in crisis, and any way to keep the lights on is fair game.
CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 2 days ago
I think it’s different than you describe since they own the publisher(s) and the distribution as well. This is no different than some famous examples like movie studios buying theaters and only showing their movies or Microsoft forcing people to use Internet Explorer. The quality of journalism should be irrelevant since the law is supposed to apply equally. Your example of Twitter killing journalism is different since they have no association with those other companies.
I agree the industry is eroding but I think that has more to do with the internet as a whole and people not wanting to pay and less to do with regulations. This situation can’t help the industry if it’s killing off a bunch of companies since they can’t get fair representation on a major platform like reddit. That just leads to further consolidation and more of what we’re currently dealing with.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
While I largely agree with graf 2, graf 1 does a fair amount of question-begging.
Not to beat a dead horse, but for those using Reddit for news, it’s undeniable that media literacy has not been imparted. The theatre and IE comparisons fall flat because you can always just go to the website. Reddit has no monopoly here.
If one uses Reddit as though it’s an RSS feed, well, that’s not an Advance problem. Not trying to victim-blame here, but come on. It’s not a site for serious news. I’ve not been subscribed to any of the news subs in years because it’s people sharing shoddily written stories and then having useless debates that ignore the central thesis.
It’s fine for entertainment, but entertainment is not news. “Look at, that cute cat” is the target demo, not, say “I’d like to know about the latest developments in the Ukraine war.” It’s akin to going to Harbor Freight for ice cream. You can’t blame the tool store for not selling food.