The New York Times reports that major online platforms are “breaking up” with news. Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, recently announced her departure. Twitter, now known as X, took headlines off their platform shortly afterwards. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram’s Threads app, a competitor of X, stated that his social network would not share news. Even Google, which has been a reliable partner to news organizations over the past decade, is no longer as dependable. The company has made layoffs in two recent reorganizations and some publishers claim Google traffic has dropped.
The decreased referral traffic from the tech companies over the past two years has had a significant impact on the news industry. The Wall Street Journal has seen a reduction since 18 months ago. Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, noted that news companies are “at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution”. Google also cut members of its news partnership team in September and laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team this week.
In an internal memo, Google’s Vice President of Global News Partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, wrote that the team would be using more artificial intelligence. He added that “difficult decisions” had to be made to position the team for the future. With Google’s AI products on the rise, news publishers are discussing what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to prepare for it.
