The traditional news media industry is witnessing the increasing power of new communication channels as it continues to lose both influence and money, a report by Reuters Institute of Journalism wrote, with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House and elections in France and Germany.
The report said it has become ever clearer throughout 2016 how big tech platforms are able to leverage their scale to drive the majority of online advertising revenue while a double-digit drop in print advertising revenues in many markets led to consolidation, job cuts and closures in the traditional media.
In the United States, almost all the growth (99%) in digital advertising went to Google or Facebook between the third quarter of 2015 and the same period in 2016, the report titled “Journalism, Media and Technology: Trends & Predictions 2017” cited.
“Publishers ended the year desperately trying to work out how they can make money as we move faster than ever from print to digital and from an internet of websites to an internet of smartphone apps and social platforms,” the report said. The forces are also affecting new digital brands and their sky-high stock market valuations.
According to the report, there’ll be heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated.
“The leading platforms are already focusing enormous resources on dealing with fake news. They know that loss of confidence in the platform will affect their bottom line, but they’ll also be desperate not to get drawn into the media business directly,” the report wrote.
It said Facebook is not going to solve the problem of fake news in the next year, but automatic picture recognition, machine learning, better verification and triaging all these programmatically are on the way.
