No news value
Social media giant Meta Platforms is to cut off the news spigot on its Facebook and Instagram platforms, at least in the Great Frozen North. Canada’s parliament has approved the Online News Act, requiring Internet companies to pay for news, with the predictable result of the Company Formerly Known as Facebook saying “thank-you, no”.
Once the law comes into effect, news stories will be excised from the company’s information firehose.
“Today, we are confirming that news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada prior to the Online News Act taking effect,” Meta said in a statement.
Similar laws were introduced in Australia in 2021, leading to a similar news lockout by the Internet giants. This came to an end when the law was watered-down in the tech companies’ favour.
It’s not particularly difficult to sympathise with the news industry. The Internet business has shown, time and again, that it will eat anyone’s lunch without so much as a by your leave. Something to think about in the face of the artificial intelligence boom, perhaps.
And yet, laws like Canada’s just will not work.
It saddens me to say it, but when it came to the Internet, the news business slit its own throat. Yes, the tech industry and its attendant Californian ideology (an apparently contradictory stew that combines hippiedom with free-market economics and outright rent-seeking from governments) said that “information wants to be free”. However, it was newspaper executives who left out the part of the famous quotation that said: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life”.
Swayed by dreams of global expansion, it was these same media executives who decided ‘reach’ was more important than paying customers. This not only had the deleterious effect of transforming publishing into a chase for clicks, it also didn’t work: the likes of Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Craigslist hoovered up the bottom end of the advertising market, while Google drove a coach and horses through the rest.
Only the financial press, well aware of the value of the information it produced, resisted the rush to give away their expensively produced reporting. Generalist newspapers, on the other hand, practically beat each other to death in the rush to tell people that what they did had no value, and went on to prove the point by drastically reducing their staff, and therefore the scope of their news-gathering, in the face of the inevitable losses.
Today, the wheel has turned, with more and more newspapers demanding their customers stump up if they want to read. Perhaps it is too late, though it does seem to have, for now at least, stanched the bleeding of red ink on Grub Street. The question of what news is worth still needs answering, however.
Back in May, Meta raised hackles by saying that news had “no economic value” to it. Perhaps it doesn’t. But it clearly has economic value in the wider sense: economic news predates general newspapering by several decades, with the latter only really coming into its own with the Crimean War, and even the value of that was linked to its impact on markets.
News has a wider social value, though. If economic data and news that might move markets has a value for those literally invested in the markers, then the rest of us might like to consider that we are socially invested in the world in which we live. This is what news, the plural of new, is for: it allows us to ground ourselves in a reality wider than the one we experience directly.
To me at least, that seems like something worth paying for. If only we did a better job.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers