Newspapers, barn doors, Facebook and Google

Friend Chris Tomlinson at the Houston Chronicle has a good column on the latest Facebook brouhaha of many, and not the only one in the past month.

It's not his only one on the subject. It's generally good, as far as it goes. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would probably sell his own grandmother to the devil for some new Facebook innovation. That's even as, in the US, Facebook traffic appears to have hit a wall and may even be tailing off. (The increasing number of Facebook memories I see in my own feed for suggested sharing — and the number that I see friends actually sharing — would be anecdotal evidence in support.)

That said, many newspapers (don't know about Chris's Chronicle) made their bed a year or two ago by signing off on the Facebook Partners program, or exactly whatever it's called.

That, in turn, continues a string of 20-plus years of multiple bad decisions related to All Things Internet.

It began in the mid-1990s when Dean Singleton, not only the creator of the now-foundering MediaNews empire, but also at that time chairman of the AP's board of directors, agreed with other AP board members that the "TV model" for newspapers would be just fine as far as "monetization" of the Internet.

The "TV model" basic point was that TV, like radio, was free, and did fine with advertising. So, why couldn't online newspapers be the same?

Well, this ignored several things.

First, cable TV wasn't free.

You counter: But, that's the same as paying an ISP provider for Internet.

First, pay cable TV channels existed in the mid-1990s, and HBO and the Playboy Channel, at least, were 15-plus years old by then.

So, it's not just hindsight to say Deano et al were wrong.

They may have been wrong in misunderestimating the reach of the Net. The first tech bubble crash at the turn of the century, followed by the Greenspan-Bush post-911 bubble inflating their ad revenues, probably fed newspaper owners' ongoing motivated reasoning.

But, they were still wrong.

They probably had a chance, by the late 1990s, if not by the early 2000s, to reverse the AP party line on "retransmission costs" for Yahoo, the first big news aggregator, and up-and-coming Google. Remember when Yahoo was the bomb?

But, eventually, that chance faded away. And, the Net and other things aided both Reuters and AFP in expanding their American presences, too. And, any agreement between them on pricing web content would be collusion.

So, AP at least stiffs smaller dailies more and more on the content of "content," even while jacking the price. The most basic AP package doesn't even include photos.

As to Facebook?

Beyond what I said above?

Algorithms are no match for people in "curation," a word that with online media is even more barf-inducing than "content."

That's true whether it's Facebook or Google.

That said, Facebook is a threat not just to daily papers of size.

The rise of Facebook Groups threatens the future of small daily and non-daily community papers as well. I know this from experience.

If people don't like your coverage of an issue, if they think that, even though you keep a good eye on city hall in general, you just have to be wrong on Issue X?

Boom. New post on the "Citizens of X" Facebook group.

Don't want to turn a string of gossip into a semi-libelous news story?

Boom. New post on the "Citizens of X" Facebook group.

Some blogs used to be this way, as the unlamented, incarcerated felon Joey Dauben illustrated well. (It still blows my mind, as it did at the time, that the Dallas Observer thought him worthy of a long-form profile, especially without considering his possible psychological background.)

But, Facebook gives credence to this stuff, in a way that a random blog doesn't.

And, the mindset of DMCA, if not the act itself, protects it legally just as much as it protects YouTube. (It's also why Mark Zuckerberg steadfastly insists he is NOT a publisher.)

Which is too bad, in a way.

A few libel lawsuits against Facebook might clean some things up.

Beyond that, of course, Facebook can subconsciously manipulate your thoughts in a way that even Google can't. (Google just consciously controls what you see, by things like paid placement, and now, its "fake news" filter that, in America, screens out anything besides the duopoly.) And it's already done it repeatedly.

This all gets to "barn doors," if it's not clear.

A lot of newspaper paywalls are still pretty permeable. And they're afraid to make them less so, as I see it. It now seems to me that the vaunted Wall Street Journal is putting more articles outside its paywall, even, if accessed by social media.

It's like an addiction, even though it's known in most cases that the online ads won't pay for that, and that you're just enabling theoretically bad behavior anyway.

That said, many addictions often seem to be the best solution for a problem even after it seems more clear to non-addicts that they're not. And, until that's recognized by the person or entity with the addiction, that won't change.

Other than pointing out many larger newspaper chains are still too hypercapitalist in what they pay corporate executives, I'm not out to bash the industry. And, while I don't claim to have solutions, I do think, at a minimum, the downward spiral on readership and ads is diminishing.

On the ads side, as Zuckerberg continues to shoot himself in his Facebook foot, newspapers have a reputation to sell, as well as the package of targeted online sales — and better targeting on the print side, too.

As for past sliding? On the circulation side, at least, as top German papers show, it's not just an American problem.