Facebook exec rants against click-bait content, but hang on a second
I like to say that with the rapid rate of change, or even upheaval, in the journalism business, we’re all journalism students all the time, even gristly old vets like me who last spent significant time in classrooms when there was still chalk in them.
Kids, ask your grandparents why chalk would have been in a classroom.
But we’re not only all students. We’re all constantly contemplating a career change. You might want to stick with the status quo, but the status is likely to have other ideas.
So I think it’s smart to try to keep up with what’s going on in the racket, even if it might not affect what you’re up to at the moment. It’s good to know the features of the ocean we’re all swimming in, and those features change all the time.
Last week there was an interesting exchange sparked by a Facebook rant by Mike Hudack, who is a director of product at Facebook.
Hudack blasted the media for focusing on click-bait content rather than “real, meaningful news.” As several commentators pointed out, it was an interesting move for Hudack not to mention Facebook’s role in that phenomenon. Alexis Madrigal a senior editor at the Atlantic, tweeted at Hudack:
@mhudack We should talk about your take on news. My perception is that Facebook is *the* major factor in almost every trend you identified.
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) May 22, 2014
@mhudack I’m not saying this as a hater, but if you asked most people in media why we do these stories, they’d say, “They work on Facebook.”
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) May 22, 2014
Here are a few other responses:
Facebook’s product guy is right, the media sucks—but journalists are also right: Facebook has to share the blame by Mathew Ingram, GigaOm
Facebook product director furious at Facebook’s effect on news by Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Where journalism, Facebook’s algorithm and responsibility lie by Alex Howard, aka Digiphile, personal Tumblr
Facebook Product Guy Slams Buzzfeed And Vox In Rant About The State Of News by Jeff Bercovici, Forbes