Werd I/O

[Kirsten Eddy at Pew Research Center]

The lede is a little buried here behind some pretty shocking top-line stats:

"Today, 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites. This is nearly on par with the 40% of Republicans who express this level of trust in national news organizations."

"[...] Adults under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites (52%) as from national news organizations (56%)."

Okay, but what's fascinating is that both groups trust local news outlets a great deal more. These have been systemically underfunded and are often run on a shoestring, but there's something about the local voice that really matters.

My suspicion - which is really just a hunch, so take it with a pinch of salt - is that it's because local news outlets don't tend to deal as much with abstract partisan politics. They're not going to comment on what Trump said now, or perceived shortcomings in the Harris campaign.

But, of course, local politics really matters. So it's interesting to think about what might happen if there's more investment in the space - something that initiatives like Tiny News Collective, the American Journalism Project and The Lenfest Institute are already thinking hard about. We need diverse, mission-driven outlets like Open Vallejo and Mission Local to spring up across the country.

My question as a technologist is how platforms, and more pointedly, open protocols can support these newsrooms. How can technology help great local journalists find the reach and make the impact they need, on their terms? And how can journalists, technologists, and product thinkers work together to shine a light on local politics and improve life in communities across the country?

#Media

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[James Salanga at The Objective]

"Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or buyout since 2022."

This mirrors the impact of layoffs in tech, and likely other industries. In 2023, Prism reported that:

"Recent surveys have found that women, people of color, disabled workers, and other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by mass layoffs in tech despite being underrepresented in the industry. According to Harvard Business Review, companies rely heavily on position and tenure when deciding on cuts, which translates to wiping out “most or all of the gains they’ve made in diversity.”"

This is damning in itself, but also suggests that many diversity gains were in positions closer to entry level than management level.

The irony for journalism is that it's the diverse members of newsrooms who can help them find broader audiences by ensuring that diverse perspectives are represented both in coverage and in management decisions. For a declining industry, it's a self-sabotaging thing to do. But, again, it says a lot about the demographics of the people who make the decisions.

#Media

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[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette]

"Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook."

"A separate email, sent by Birmingham Live editor Graeme Brown last month, suggested journalists should file at least eight stories per day unless they were newsgathering outside of the office."

Referrals from Facebook are down from 50% of traffic to 5%, and every newsroom is seeing similar declines from both social and search. But this is an insane way to deal with it: asking every journalist to file eight stories a day is a way to drive quality through the floor and exacerbate a downward spiral.

You can't just keep doing what you're doing but more of it. This change requires a rethink of platform and more ownership over newsroom technology: it's time to actually innovate around what it means to publish on the web, and to, finally, move from "audience" to "community".

To be blunt: every newsroom publishing on the web that doesn't do this will go away.

#Media

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[ John Naughton ]

"If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30."

Running a blog for 30 years is no small feat. Dave Winer's Scripting News is a big deal that has an enduring community which he's built from scratch over that time.

This also resonates:

"In my experience, most journalists failed to understand the significance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr Johnson, they thought that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, and so bloggers must be weird."

My position: everyone should blog. Every new voice adds something new to the conversation. And long-term bloggers like Dave have shown the way.

#Media

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[Andrew Schmelyun]

Following my piece about reading the news on paper, I came across this post from Anrew Schmelyun:

"I recently purchased a dot matrix printer from eBay, and thought it would be a great excuse to have a custom "front page" printed out and ready for me each day. So, that's what I built!"

What a neat idea: he's called a few APIs (the New York Times, Reddit, Open-Meteo, and so on), installed it to run on a Raspberry Pi, and connected it to an old-school dot matrix printer to create a kind of Telex newspaper each morning,

I'd thought about doing this with an e-ink display, but honestly, why not just print it out?

I think I would want to pick some different news sources (the NYT is no longer my go-to) and leave out Reddit in favor of links that my contacts had shared on, say, Mastodon, but this is really fun. I might try and put together something similar, albeit with my existing laser printer rather than a dot matrix setup.

#Media

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[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab]

There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%.

But the focus is this:

"Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively steady during the period, Brad Streicher, sales director at Chartbeat, said in a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Atlanta last week. Google Discover — the Google product offering personalized content recommendations via Google’s mobile apps — is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13% across Chartbeat clients since January 2023."

I think what's particularly notable here is the shift between kind of product. Google Search, despite the black box nature of its ever-changing algorithm, always felt like it was a part of the open web.

Discover, on the other hand, is an algorithmic recommendation product that tries to proactively give users more of what they want to read. It's much more akin to a Facebook newsfeed than it is a search index. There are likely editors behind the scenes, and a human touch to what gets surfaced. Publishers are even more in the dark about how to show up there than they were about how to rise through search engine rankings.

I'm curious about what this means for the web. Is this just an advertising / walled garden play from a company that wants to maximize advertising revenue and time on platform? Or is it a reflection of the web getting too big and too messy for many users, creating the need for a firmer hand to show them where the good content is? Is it a function of increased skittishness about an open web that might publish content and ideas that aren't brand safe? Or is it just changing user behavior in light of other apps?

Perhaps some elements of all of the above?

#Media

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[Paul Bradley Carr]

"I’ve worked at (and founded!) my fair share of billionaire-funded publications and I’ve always had a firm rule: You have to be more critical of the people writing the checks (and their cronies) than you are of anyone else. It’s the only way to offset the inherent bias of taking their money."

Paul Carr discusses quitting his column at the SF Standard because of its newfound apparent shyness when it comes to criticizing tech moguls - which is a serious journalistic flaw when you consider how important said moguls are to the culture and politics of San Francisco.

This is in the wake of fallout from its coverage of Ben Horowitz's conversion to MAGA, to which the subjects publicly objected. The SF Standard's backer, Michael Moritz, is another wealthy tech backer, who has actually been collaborating with Horowitz's partner Marc Andreessen to build a sort of city of the future on repurposed agricultural land in the North Bay.

As Paul points out, there must be a separation of church and state between editorial and business operations in a newsroom in order to maintain journalistic integrity. That doesn't seem to be something every newcomer understands.

#Media

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[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation]

Dan Kennedy picks up on a detail in Brian Stelter's Atlantic article about troubles at the Washington Post:

"The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line."

He goes on to sing Arc's praises, but notes that 25% of its staff were just laid off, and wonders what went wrong there.

Here's what I think happened. There were two parallel forces at play:

• Newsrooms are not natural software companies (except for their own ends).
• Content management systems are a commodity technology.

It's notable that almost every newsroom that has built its own CMS has eventually left it in favor of a platform built by someone else - most commonly WordPress. Sinking resources into building your own means spending money to solve problems that someone else has already solved, and often solved well.

Particularly in tough times for the industry, newsrooms need to be spending money on the things that differentiate them, not by reinventing perfectly good wheels. WordPress isn't zero cost - most newsrooms partner with an agency and a managed hosting provider like WordPress VIP - but it's a lot cheaper than building all those features yourself would be. And the outcome by picking an open source platform is likely higher quality.

The exception is if the way you both think about and present content is radically different to anyone else. If you're truly a beautiful and unique snowflake, then, yes, building your own CMS is a good idea. But there isn't a single newsroom out there that is unique.

Likewise, if I'm a potential customer (and, as it turns out, I am!), I don't know why I'd pick a proprietary platform that's subject to the changing business strategies of its troubled owner over an open source platform which gives me direct ownership over the code and powers a significant percentage of the web. The upside would have to be stratospherically good. Based on sales emails I get that choose to focus on Arc's AI readiness, that case isn't being made.

The outcome is a bit sad. We need newsrooms; we need journalism; we need an informed voting population. Honestly, the Arc bet was worth trying: I can see how a platform play would have been a decent investment. But that doesn't seem to be how it's panned out, to the detriment of its parent.

#Media

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[Casey Newton at Platformer]

This fantastic round-up post focuses on Platformer's decision in January to leave Substack in protest of its content policies that permitted full-throated Nazis to earn money on the platform.

With a long-term view, it's been a good strategic move:

"We’re much less vulnerable to platform shifts than we were before. I had long worried that Substack’s unprofitable business would eventually lead it to make decisions that were not in the best interest of our readers or our business. (Besides not removing literal 1930s Nazi content, I mean.)"

This is the reason publishers should publish from a website they control. Sure, you can syndicate out to meet readers where they're at, but owning your own space makes you much less subject to the whims of someone else's platform.

And even that syndication to social platforms is becoming more controllable. One hope for the future that Casey notes:

"One way I hope [Platformer] will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps."

Ghost, the open source platform that now powers Platformer, is building fediverse support directly into its platform at a rapid pace, so this almost feels like an inevitability. The benefit will be that Platformer can reach its readers on platforms like Threads, Flipboard, and Mastodon and maintain full control over its relationships with them. That's a game-changer for publishers.

#Media

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[Simon Willison]

"Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read."

It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about the priorities MrBeast instills in his team. Simon points out that video is ingrained in the culture:

"Which is more important, that one person has a good mental grip of something or that their entire team of 10 people have a good mental grip on something? Obviously the team. And the easiest way to bring your team up to the same page is to freaken video everything and store it where they can constantly reference it. A lot of problems can be solved if we just video sets and ask for videos when ordering things. [...] Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."

MrBeast will be studied for decades to come: a piece of the culture that, like him or not, is genuinely new. This document is a key to understanding what he does.

#Media

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[Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos at NiemanLab]

"To survive, journalism must continue to embrace technology. But doing so should never cost newsrooms their independence. News organizations should prioritise building direct relationships with their audience to reduce reliance on third-party platforms. They should also stay informed about evolving regulations, and actively participate in policy discussions shaping the future of the news-tech relationship."

Exactly.

There are good points made here about paying for news technology. My belief is that there's value in sharing resources between newsrooms. Building and supporting technology as a commons could help newsrooms further their goals while staying independent. This shared model also prevents newsrooms from each developing the same commodity technology, which across the industry is a huge misuse of resources.

Clearly, too, a strong independent social web benefits both newsrooms and news consumers. A strong fediverse helps empower newsrooms to build direct relationships. Newsrooms should support this movement.

Regardless of the solution, it's good to see these topics being brought up in the news space. These represent the problems and the existential threats: now it's up to the industry to act.

#Media

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[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post]

I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone.

"What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operation that has raised nearly $60 million and employs 55 people. And in a sign of its growing ambitions, the 19th has now hired veteran news executive LaSharah Bunting, CEO of the Online News Association, as its first vice president, a role created to build up the 19th’s fundraising and budget operations."

It's also grown an endowment, which allows it to have a safety net and continue to grow and experiment. The ambition for the endowment to underwrite the newsroom's operations is meaningful: this would represent a fund designed to allow reporting on gender, politics, and policy to be undertaken sustainably. I don't know of any other similar fund in media.

Not mentioned here but extremely relevant: the amazing work Alexandra Smith, its Chief Strategy Officer, has been doing to redefine how to think about audience and reach on a fragmented web.

These are all signs of a forward-thinking newsroom that isn't content to simply accept the status quo - and, crucially, plans to stick around.

#Media

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[Heather Bryant]

Arguing that it's harder to just be a human online, Heather Bryant has published an online participation disclaimer:

"The following disclaimer applies to participation in discourse as it relates to my individual experience as a human being in a global online community and the collective communication occurring therein. This disclaimer is intended to acknowledge the complexities, challenges and sometimes human incompatibility with discourse occurring at potentially global scale."

Honestly, this disclaimer feels universal: it's something that I would feel comfortable posting on my own site or linking to. It's both very complete and a little bit sad: these things should be commonly understood. In some ways, these clauses are obvious. But by naming them, Heather is making a statement about what it means to participate in online discourse, and what the experience of that actually is for her.

It's worth reflecting on everything here, but in particular the "some things for some people" and "spheres of relevance" sections hit home for me. It's a commonly-held nerd fallacy (forgive me for using that term) that everything is for everyone, and that everything is relevant for comment. The conversational equivalent of inviting people from multiple facets of your life to the same party and assuming it'll all go great.

It's worth asking: if you had such a disclaimer, would it be any different? What do you wish was commonly understood?

#Media

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[The 404 Media team]

"In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. [...] If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed."

404 Media has been a new shining light in technology journalism. That it's worked out for them, having invested a thousand dollars each at the outset, is delightful.

And then there's this:

"The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam."

So to counter that, they're building community. Which just so happens to be what every single newsroom should also be doing.

Here's to another year of 404.

#Media

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[Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review]

"What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail."

"[...] Newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business."

Interesting reflections here on newsrooms that split in order to incubate future-facing innovation alongside their legacy businesses. It seems like a good idea to me, if you can afford it: a pro-innovation culture is likely to shed the bureaucracy and processes that may be present in an older business. (This isn't just true for newspapers vs "digital", whatever digital is: it's also true for businesses that are set in an older version of the web.)

The trouble is, as this article notes, that these innovative newsrooms are likely to be so successful that they end up re-merging with the main newsroom and falling under its control. At that point the culture of innovation tends to die, which is something anyone in the tech industry who watched Yahoo acquire startups in the mid-2000s will recognize clearly.

So what's the solution? I think there isn't one. It may be more effective for the innovative newsrooms to be spun off completely, so that they aren't so much parallel sides of the same organization as new organizations entirely, with a more complete ability to reinvent how they work. My guess is that this would extend far beyond new modes of content and audience engagement and extend to the experience of working itself. After all, that's exactly what happened in tech - an exploration that, depending on the organization, was often positive for tech workers. Some people in news describe tech workers as "coddled"; I'd describe it more as "free to invent".

#Media

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[Nieman Journalism Lab]

"The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop."

This report is in-depth and fascinating. It seems obvious to me that having more news sources with specific focuses is a really good thing, but also that ensuring that they are sustainable is crucial. Many journalistic outlets were created by journalists with business models as almost an afterthought, so as certain kinds of funding dried up they became less viable.

One thing that I really wish was present in this report: platform. What was Substack's influence here? Or Ghost's? Are these WordPress shops? How many of them were aided by Automattic's Newspack, for example? These details could also be revealing.

We need journalism that keeps us more informed, and it's not a secret that many of our incumbent outlets are not doing the job. A healthy news startup ecosystem is one way we can get to a more informed voting population and stronger democracies in our local communities, nationally, and globally.

#Media

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[Bron Maher at PressGazette]

"Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies."

I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the EU. Meta is in trouble for a similar sort of scheme. Here, though, in a UK free from EU constraints, there are no such issues.

It's a terrible approach, both in terms of user privacy, and in terms of the newsrooms' own business models: the people most likely to pay to remove ads are also the wealthier people ad buyers want to reach. So not only does this create bad feeling with the reader-base as a whole, but it reduces the value of the ads. It's lose-lose. (Also: who is actually paying for the Daily Express online?)

The irony, as always, is that contextual ads which adjust themselves to the content of articles are more lucrative than targeted ads that rely on reader surveillance. The business model reason to track users is overstated. But here it is again.

#Media

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[Richard J. Tofel]

"I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential."

"[...] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is no longer profitable."

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica, and generally knows a thing or two about the news business.

There's a line to walk here: there's certainly risk, as Tofel describes, of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the same time, as I've previously lamented, the industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas. It's certainly true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also can't be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they're cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a democracy.

Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale. Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad). Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture, although most of us know that this often isn't the case.

It's complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as important as it's ever been, and getting news leadership right is crucial.

#Media

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"There’s an ocean of problems with journalism, but the idea that there’s just too damn much woke progressivism is utter delusion. U.S. journalism generally tilts center right on the political spectrum."

This is a story about the founder of Politico creating a "teaching hospital for journalists" that appears to be in opposition to "wokeness". But it's also about much of the state of incumbent journalism, which is still grappling with the wave of much-needed social change that is inspiring movements around the world.

"In the wake of Black Lives Matter and COVID there was some fleeting recommendations to the ivy league establishment media that we could perhaps take a slightly more well-rounded, inclusive approach to journalism. In response, the trust fund lords in charge of these establishment outlets lost their [...] minds, started crying incessantly about young journalists “needing safe spaces,” and decided to double down on all their worst impulses, having learned less than nothing along the way."

Exactly. Asinine efforts like anti-woke journalism schools aren't what we need; we need better intersectional representation inside newsrooms, we need better representation of the real stories that need to be told across the country and across the world, and we need to dismantle institutional systems that have acted as gatekeepers for generations.

All power to the outlets, independent journalists, and foundations that are truly trying to push for something better. The status quo is not - and has not been - worth preserving.

#Media

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"Eghbariah’s paper for the Columbia Law Review, or CLR, was published on its website in the early hours of Monday morning. The journal’s board of directors responded by pulling the entire website offline. [...] According to Eghbariah, he worked with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over five months on the 100-plus-page text."

Regardless of your perspective on the ongoing crisis in Israel and Palestine, this seems like a remarkable action: removing a heavily-reviewed, 100+ page legal analysis because it discusses the Nakba, the mass-displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Palestine war.

The right thing to do would be to publish it - as the editors tried to do - and allow legal discussion to ensue. Instead, the board of directors chose to simply pull the plug on the website.

As one Columbia professor put it:

“When Columbia Law Professor Herbert Weschler published his important article questioning the underlying justification for Brown v. Board of Education in 1959 it was regarded by many as blasphemous, but is now regarded as canonical. This is what legal scholarship should do at its best, challenge us to think hard about hard things, even when it is uncomfortable doing so.”

If nothing else, this is a reflection of how sensitive these issues are in the current era, whose voices are allowed to be heard, and the conflicts between different ideologies, even on university campuses.

#Media

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This is an interesting business model: UK broadcasters are trading unused ad space for equity in digital media startups, turning them into venture-scale investors.

"The move comes as broadcasters continue to face a tough economic downturn where corporate clients have slashed spending on advertising – which is traditionally seen as a bellwether of the economic climate."

The thing about venture investing is that it doesn't have a short time horizon: exits could easily be a decade away. So this is either a deliberately long game or a really short-sighted move on behalf of the broadcasters, who might not be prepared to hold a basket of liabilities for that long. Of course, they could presumably sell the equity, but that pressure on the secondary market would have the potential to drive the startups' share prices down. Really the broadcasters need to hold onto their portfolios.

I'm very curious to see how this plays out. It's definitely an innovative way to use an otherwise illiquid asset (unsold ad space). I want these broadcasters to survive, and I like the ecosystem-building aspect of this, so I hope it all works out for everyone involved.

#Media

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"The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been. This is truly a jointly owned responsibility among the business side and editorial."

Every non-profit newsroom needs to move their center of gravity from large contributions to smaller, distributed support from its reader base. The Guardian is doing it incredibly well, and there's a lot to learn from how it's going about things.

I'm not sure about the idea of tracking revenue per article, but the idea of making the whole newsroom involved in its continued existence doesn't seem bad to me (even if it goes against accepted orthodoxy). The trick is not taking it too far, and being open to secondary or tertiary effects. There are some stories that are vitally important even if they aren't obvious moneymakers, and newsrooms must retain a strong argument for running them.

The Guardian's "epic" at the bottom of every article drives a ton of revenue for them, and I'd love to learn more about how they optimize it in practice.

Finally, this seems right to me, and something for all news (for-profit and non-profit alike) to emulate:

"Nine or 10 years ago, we did a lot of work to decide whether we should have a paywall or not. And we decided that we would both fulfill our mission better, but we would also generate more revenue, if there were no paywall. Now it’s part of our DNA and we talk about it every day." #Media

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"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica."

Hey, that's where I work!

The article continues:

"Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its mission. The latest iteration of that is the 50 State Initiative, announced last month."

The 50 State Initiative is a commitment to publishing accountability journalism in every US state over the next five years. This is an expansion of the Local Reporting Network, which was already doing great work in partnership with local newsrooms. As this piece points out, there are actually only two states where ProPublica hasn't run some kind of an investigative story - but, of course, the 50 States Initiative goes much deeper than that. It's an exciting time to be working here. #Media

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"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020."

And publications are becoming dependent on it.

I agree strongly with the journalist's view at the bottom of this piece:

"It incentivizes users to subscribe to Apple News+ rather than to publications directly, likely cannibalizing some potential revenue. It’s driving editorial decisions, meaning publishers are once again changing their content strategy to placate a platform. And of course the company could wake up one day and decide, like Facebook, that it no longer really wants to be in the news business, leaving news publishers stranded."

Newsrooms - say it with me - need to establish direct, first-party connections with their audiences. Anything else gives a third party too much supplier power over their businesses and presents an existential risk. Apple News is useful right now, but at its heart the dynamics that drive it are no different to Facebook or Twitter. There's nothing to say it's here for good, and there's nothing smart about letting Apple own your relationship with your readers. #Media

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"Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58%."

I'll bang this drum forever: establish direct relationships with your audience. Do not trust social media companies to be your distribution.

That means through your website.

That means through email.

That means through direct social like the fediverse.

It's long past time that media learned this and internalized it forever. #Media

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