![]() Our staff outside of those hubs don’t have those options, though. ![]() This is an interesting scenario for us because as digital media companies have gotten wealthier and wealthier we’ve found our own staff becoming less coast-concentrated - many New Yorkers and Californians leave Autostraddle for better-paying gigs at publications like Refinery29 and Broadly. Instead, it’s led to a generation of digital publishers - all those guys in New York - chasing scale and racing to be as big as possible. Online advertising was supposed to let a thousand media flowers bloom, supporting independents and small, high-quality publishers. The web and linking were supposed to expand routes of distribution - but over time, we’ve seen that power become clustered in Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a handful of other tech companies. You see this pattern over and over again in digital news: What was once pitched as opening up a space has led instead to greater concentration of power in the hands of a few. The Internet should, in theory, enable us to get more news from more places and have staff writers all over the country, but it isn’t: instead, thanks to digital media, the American news business is more concentrated in New York and and the coasts than ever: As data takes over newsroom after newsroom, how can we ensure important but less popular stories get told? Related: Trying to get people to read about Lahore isn’t easy.Īlso related: “ The problem with clickbait articles is that many of them are aimed at destroying the reputation of a business, celebrity, or even a politician.” We’ve Got The Whole World In Our Hands (Also here’s a thing about where analytics fail anyhow!) Publishers are hiring full-time specialists specifically tasked with fostering relationships with Facebook and Snapchat! That’s never where we’re gonna put our money, which’s why A+ makes so much sense to us. Filloux also points out that the costs of data-driven journalism are incredibly high - the trackers, the analytics experts, et al. Plus, articles that go viral are great ways for our stuff to reach new people who will become new readers and maybe members, merch-buyers or camp-goers. ( Join A Plus!). We’re not totally freed from clickbait’s clutches, though: we do get some income through advertising, so views matter a whole lot, and they also matter w/r/t our reputation and our ability to attract sponsors and interviews, attract talented writers and illustrators, get press passes, win awards and, basically, to be taken seriously in an industry where women’s publications are chronically undervalued, let alone gay women. The solutions proposed by Frédéric Filloux to redeem the industry are new models less reliant on pageviews: “paywalls, nonprofit journalism and separating clickbait from the rest of the newsroom (like Buzzfeed does).” We’re not a non-profit and we’ll never be able to afford a “clickbait department,” so what we’ve settled on is a subscription model that enables us to worry less about clicks and more about what our readers like to read and the stories we think are important. When it comes to publications themselves, editorial strategies guided by real-time audience tracking and extensive data mining is, according to some people, ruining journalism. Analytics-Driven content!!!!įacebook’s data-driven partnership with Glamour magazine to host online town halls leading up to the 2016 election could be a slippery slope, as it risks the underwhelming result of “plucking content directly from reader’s brains, and then presenting it back to them on a silver platter.” It’s been another few weeks with a lot of interesting questions about the future of digital media on two specific fronts: the rise of data-driven content and the geographic concentration of large media companies. Welcome to your 25th business of art fix, in which I have renewed my library books. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.
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