The news decoupling
Social networks and newspapers diverge - Media Ecology Newsletter #24
Facebook is abandoning its newspaper collaboration project, it seems: Columbia Journalism Review has an article about it. Facebook stops investing in the project that began in 2019 with great fanfare. The reason: only 3 percent of posts circulating on the platform have a link to a newspaper article.
It may be because people on Facebook are into other things and don't want to know about newspapers. Or it may be because people have become accustomed to finding links to newspapers on Twitter. Or it may be because newspapers are increasingly visible only to subscribers. The fact is that there is a disconnect between newspapers and the social network.
Newspapers seek other forms of relationship with the public: they make branding products for Instagram, they try to make themselves known to young people on TikTok or Twitch, they send newsletters. And fatally they gradually break away from seeking advertising, looking for subscriptions, or sponsors for events.
Meanwhile, social networks have their own problems. Twitter is going through a controversial disbandment. Facebook is losing credibility. Instagram seems to be aging. The new socials seem to require some sort of specific creativity to be explored. And the social networks' business model is going to be discussed as advertising is increasingly going to ecommerce platforms (La Svolta).
The newspapers and social networks we know so far are separating. Could the next stage be the building of a true social, wiki, smart, healthy, and clean platform for information? That could be good news.
Welcome to the “media ecology” newsletter. Newspapers have been fighting and cooperating with social networks only to find their business models disrupted and their credibility mixed with the attention hunger of everybody else. But they seem to be less and less linked to social networks. It could lead to good news. Please, take a look at this post on my blog for updates. After this note, I share some links, hoping they are useful to readers.
In the meantime
Risky online behaviour ‘almost normalised’ among young people, says study. The Guardian
Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial, The Verge
Cyborgs v ‘holdout humans’: what the world might be like if our species survives for a million years, The Conversation
Podcasts in Italian, by me
L’altra metà del verso. Rai Radio 3
Media Ecology. Intesa Sanpaolo on air
Eppur s’innova. Luiss University Press
Ecology of screens
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