A lack of local news across vast swaths of the United States has forced Facebook to abandon plans to build localized aggregators for around a third of the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Launched last year, Facebook’s local-news aggregator, Today In, is currently available in 400 cities via the company’s mobile app. In order to justify the service, there needs to be at least five local articles a day related to a city.
And it’s not just rural areas – Facebook found a shortfall of local news in high-density states such as New Jersey.
Facebook’s difficulties finding local news raise profound concerns over the future of the local news industry in the United States, where advertising revenue has collapsed as online platforms have sapped up market share.
Facebook and Google – which earned 60% of all digital advertising revenue in the US last year according to eMarketer – have played a major role in the decline of local news outlets.
According to Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight chair in journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina and a former Wall Street Journal executive, more than one in five newspapers have closed in the past decade and a half, leaving half the counties in the nation with just one newspaper, and 200 counties with no newspaper at all.
Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, predicted in 2016 that as many as half of the country’s local newspapers will no longer be in print by 2021. –Wall Street Journal
According to the report, nearly 1,800 local newspapers have failed in the past 15 years according to Abernathy, while only around 400 news sites have replaced them – most of which are clustered around big cities.
Online publishers, meanwhile, have complained that Google and Facebook have too much power over who sees news stories.
As the Journal reports, Facebook executives are keenly aware that they may hurt themselves as they continue to destroy the local news industry.
“We really do care deeply about local news, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because users have told us for years that what they want to see is more local news,” said Today In product marketing manager Jimmy O’Keefe.
To that end, Facebook has donated millions of dollars and organized programs in recent years to bolster the local-news industry. On Monday, it also announced the Facebook Journalism Project Community Network, a grant and mentoring program for local news outlets.
The company also said it would be sharing its data about local-news “deserts” with leading academics, including Ms. Abernathy and Mr. Mele, to further their research. –Wall Street Journal
“We’ve been clear from the beginning that we think the first step to solving this problem is measuring it,” said Today In product manager Anthea Watson Strong – adding that the company would only be able to determine “what kind of intervention” it should take if they collaborate with academics to analyze the situation.
“I’m looking forward to getting the data and overlaying it on the data we have on news deserts,” said Abernathy.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FkGl8F Tyler Durden