Social media platforms like Facebook are escalating their efforts to get real news — politically troublesome tales of greed and corruption — out of your feed. They’ve decided it’s bad for business when users leave their walled garden to read a long article instead of continuously scrolling through Facebook.
This has been a long time coming, but we’ve passed the point of no return. Visits to The Intercept’s website from Facebook dropped by more than half in the past year. Visits from our own Facebook page dropped by an astonishing 83 percent.
When Facebook and its ilk bury our content, that doesn’t just mean fewer clicks or pageviews. Because we’re a nonprofit, fewer new readers also means fewer of the donations that ensure we’ll still be here tomorrow publishing journalism that takes on the powerful.
To help fill that gap, we still need to raise another $175,000 in reader donations by this Saturday, September 30 to expand our coverage and face down an array of other challenges, from rising costs and billionaire lawsuits to simple news burnout.
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If you stay in journalism long enough, you learn that today’s new normal is tomorrow’s old news. In just a few years, the blog era I came up in was supplanted by a social media ecosystem of likes, shares, and infinite scrolling. Now that’s changing too.
Facebook’s parent company Meta seems ready to be done with serious news, which once made them relevant but never made them much money. It did cause our Silicon Valley overlords exactly the kind of messy political problems they think they’re too good for: liberals accusing them of throwing the 2016 election to Trump, conservatives complaining about censorship.
And now that the competition is lighthearted video apps that never link out to another site — which leaves money on the table — Meta is racing to keep up.
The news industry will learn to live without Facebook, and maybe we’ll be better off for it. But the transition will be difficult. While we’d love to be done with Zuckerberg as much as many of our readers would, Facebook remains a primary news source for millions of Americans. It’s our job to meet those people where they are and earn their support.
Thank you,
