- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.
That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.
They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.
They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.
I probably read a few of your articles, unless you were covering Arch. Not sure if that was yet a thing at the time of the Digg fiasco.
It’s sad that those were the incentive structures, but I find it unsurprising. By my final years in a newsroom, reporters had quotas for social-media posts. Guess what you’re not doing when you need to tweet eight times a day? Actual reporting.
One might say, “OK, but it doesn’t take that much time out of your day,” which I’ll grant, but it takes you out of the flow. If you’re thinking about your next tweet, you aren’t thinking about what other source you need to talk to that would solidify the story.
Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases. Longform is still going strong (e.g. Ars, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic), and I’m relatively certain Ars has cost me way more than just the subscription. I learned about Factorio on there, and a few weeks later, I got my life back.
A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.