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Opinion: A Robust Free Press Is Critical To Democracy. Google, Facebook, And Big Tech Are Killing Democracy

Opinion: A Robust Free Press Is Critical To Democracy. Google, Facebook, And Big Tech Are Killing Democracy

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Photo: Robert Scoble/Flickr

Things aren’t looking good for journalists. The industry is laying off reporters and writers across the board. In fact, about 2,400 journalists and media staffers in the country were fired in just the first few months of 2019. And many are pointing the finger at big tech, especially Facebook and Google.

Laura Bassett was one of them. After almost a decade as a writer at The Huffington Post, Bassett was laid off in January.

“We at HuffPost knew the cuts were coming. They’d been the subject of happy-hour chats for weeks. Verizon, our parent company, had declared our website essentially worthless in late 2018 and directed staff reductions across the board. Even so, my own layoff came as a shock. As a senior politics reporter for the site who represented it on cable news every weekend, my job had felt like an integral part of my identity,” Bassett wrote in The American Prospect.

So why is big tech the problem? The digital ad market is being taken over by Google and Facebook which consume more than 60 percent of all revenue. Journalists are suffering.

“BuzzFeed laid off 15 percent of its staff the day after Verizon eliminated my job at HuffPost; Vice layoffs came soon after. Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, cut 400 jobs from local papers. In April, more job cuts hit the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which has shrunk to less than a tenth of its former size over the past few years, leaving just 33 journalists to cover a metro area of two million people,” Bassett wrote.

Over at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, its entire staff of 65 was let go when the 182-year-old newspaper was folded into a competitor.

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And it seems things will get worse as Apple is set to roll out its own news subscription product, Apple News+.  Google is also planning a policy change that would severely undermine news gathering. The company is reportedly considering restricting third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser, Bassett wrote.

Ttech companies realize the negative impact they are having on journalism. To counter this, they have pledged $600 million toward the media industry. Still, this won’t slow the ebb of firings. As Bassett wrote, “…this is a drop in the bucket compared to the damage they have caused — $600 million is a small price to pay to ensure publishers become more reliant on the data Google and Facebook harvest from users across their multiple platforms. It would be far more helpful for them to facilitate a flow of digital advertising dollars back to the publishers who hire the journalists and create the content, instead of tweaking their policies in ways that make it even harder for a digital news site to sell an ad.”