The Zuck promises to give you more local news – and so save the world Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken another step on his path to enlightenment, informing the masses that henceforth the Holy Facebook will include more news from local sources. The teaching was posted to The Zuck's personal page and in it he reveals the great truth to his followers: that understanding of issues closest to …
> precipitous drop in advertising revenue thanks to the dominance of digital companies
No, it's a precipitous drop in advertising revenue thanks to the precipitous drop in quality.
My local paper is so shite I get angry when they throw it on the lawn for free.
They can't even get a story about maintenance on the local decorative water fountain right.
They can't get a story about the airport building a new terminal right.
They can't get a story about the Falcon Heavy right, even when it should have been just a copy&paste from the AP newsfeed.
Our local paper isn't bad in many ways - lots of news, and so long as it's simple factual stuff (accidents, funerals, weddings etc) it's fine. Not good when it gets on to opinion and local cou ncil etc.
So sad, it used to be a major campaigning paper - calling for votes for women back in the 1870s, but now different owners.
Actually, those are what I call "non news". Irrelevant.
I really don't care if about bike/car accidents - unless they are caused by specific facts that need attention (i.e. if a bridge breaks, or an intersection is ill-designed), nor about people dying naturally or getting married (let it to Facebook...). Sure, they are cheap "news" easy to gather, they don't "annoy" anyone, and fill pages.
Utterly useless, though. That's why I rarely read local news. Local journalism still need to be journalism. It does require resources, though, and ads aren't enough.
This. Newspapers seem to get the cause-and-effect thing backwards. Newspapers were harmed by massive consolidation that resulted in a serious decline in quality. This happened before the internet was a viable competitor. People jumped to the internet for news because newspapers were already in a terrible state.
FB could crash and burn tomorrow for all I care. Never used it, never will. How people get so caught up in it I'll never know. I was hoping that whatever will replace FB just hurries up and get's on with it, but I know it will just be the same... or worse. Who needs Skynet when you can have Zucknet.
I have never seen any news on facebook - fake or otherwise.
All I see is a load of my mates wishing each other happy birthday and sharing links to clips of kittens and publishing photos of their day out.
I just checked - this *is* the "newsfeed" . News of what my mates had for tea.
It is a misuse of the word news really.
Am I missing something?
Nope... it's call "mission creep". FB was, originally as I recall, just a place to connect with friends. They didn't do news, weather, sports, etc. as other sites (and hardcopies) did that. Now FB needs to zuck up all that it can, pasteurize it, and spoon feed it to the masses who would rather spend their time looking at cat vids, gossip from the neighbors and family and get their news from TV. That is, if they even care about finding what's happening in the world.
BT won't (usually) replay other conversations down the phone line at you or record your conversation and play it to other people, or advertise something while you use it, or play news bulletins it has decided you might be interested in but often turn out to be completely wrong though.
Would Zuck like to do something useful?
Perhaps he could **STOP** bribing county executives (and other county bureaucrats) to get them to tear up a functional tourist railroad so they can use taxpayer money to build a bike trail for Zuck and his cronies.
But no, Zuck feels he's better than the rest of us.
Facebook insists that I am in Wolfhamcote, even warning me "it'll be raining in Wolfhamcote tonight!"
It's not a million miles out, in terms of latitude and longitude, but Wolfhamcote has been abandoned for hundreds of years and now comprises little more than a few ruins and a deconsecrated church.
Its a fountain of nothing! Yet 'facebook friendly RTE' (aka Facebook's Irish PR bitch & pal of lite-touch regulator 'DPC'), wouldn't want you thinking that:
'Facebook reveals privacy principles for first time'
https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2018/0129/936674-facebook-privacy/
If Facebook draws too many clicks away from local news sources, those sources will fail. There go Facebook's "free" sources. Facebook is trying to be the one-stop-shop for the Internet-illiterati. Zuck should stick to the plan: produce a site where sad people can post banal information about their meaningless lives. And saturate it with ads for weight-loss and self-help programs.
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