Must-Read: Felix Salmon: Facebook Could Kill the News Brand<

Must-Read: Felix Salmon mourns the coming journalistic future. But it has seemed to me for a long time that most reporters worth reading would produce better work if they could find their audience without all the intermediary armamentarium of “editors and fact-checkers and clear ethical guidelines”. Why do I think this? Because those come with additional very heavy organizational, rhetorical, and moral baggage. Because most reporters worth reading at all are much more interesting and teach me more via email and in person than when they are placed behind the screen of the media organization. Why is this so? Because most reporters want to be trusted information intermediaries, while rather fewer people who run or set up media organizations care much about being so.

Felix Salmon: Facebook Could Kill the News Brand: “It seems my prediction is coming true: Facebook wants news stories to live within its own app…

…That’s better for Facebook’s readers… and… Facebook, which gets to keep those readers within its own ecosystem and collect more data on exactly what kind of stories they like to read. It’s also good for companies like BuzzFeed… [seeking] to reach a large, young, mobile, social audience in a multitude of different ways. The ability to reach those people is something of a holy grail for advertisers…. The key here is reach — which, in an app-based world, is a very different animal from traffic. So it’s no surprise that BuzzFeed looks set to be one of the first publishers to sign on to Facebook’s new native-news platform.

It’s more surprising, however, that the New York Times is going to be one of the others…. The NYT… has a different business model, which is to build a loyal readership of people who trust the brand to deliver top-flight news, and then to monetize that readership…. The downside [of partnering with Facebook] is potentially enormous…. Losing website traffic… losing control over… how your content is presented and delivered… the things which make your news brand memorable and unique….

Talented individuals, rather than brands, [will make a good living by producing the kind of news content which ‘works really well’ on Facebook…. The result could be an existential crisis for news organizations with old-fashioned things like editors and fact-checkers and clear ethical guidelines. Those things are expensive, and it’s far from clear that Facebook’s readers particularly value them. The risk is that they’ll just get disintermediated away.