This article furthers this notion that the existence of social networks and other Internet services alike, are at nothing but a detriment to the newspaper industry. Looking at Facebook specifically, it's been made clear that the network has garnered a considerable amount of criticism in the last few weeks going from the censorship issue with the Phan Thi Kim Phuc napalm image, to whether their trending news topics present a bias to users to even their recently discovered reputation for tax avoidance. It's also referred to in the article that the social network has a strong hold in advertising revenue (on the Internet) due to the sophisticated targeting that can take place with the inputs of information users will enter about themselves on it. It's said that this in particular, is what is resulting in journalists for newspaper publications to lose their jobs, newspapers simply can't keep up with these advancements.
- 66% of Facebook users get news through the site.
- Facebook could be liable to pay between $3 to $5bn in extra US tax
- Facebook topped $2 billion in quarterly profit, six months after crossing the billion dollar mark for the first time
- Facebook added 220 million monthly active users in the past year, bringing the total audience to 1.71 billion users
- More than 90% of Facebook’s users are on mobile devices, where Facebook rakes in the bulk of its ad dollars
In my opinion, this article is only another confirmation that print is an increasingly dying media. As the use of online services/counterparts becomes more commonly used, the more it'll be in decline to the point where even more people (journalists) will lose their jobs if they haven't already. One thing to pick up on though is that although the network has attracted some bad press for the trending topics that they present due to its algorithmic nature, newspapers can be accused of also 'picking and choosing' what to publish, so perhaps a more objective viewpoint has to be picked up on here.
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