The New Yorker / Kyle Chayka
Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over →“The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in ‘the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.’ This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the ‘percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’’ has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.”
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Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
Google faces a potential breakup on multiple fronts →“As these cases proceed through the remedy phase, the government is expected to argue that Google should be forced to sell off significant chunks of its business. And those sales—if and when they actually come to pass—could change the way that online publishing works in some fundamental ways.”
The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
The Dispatch buys SCOTUSblog, a Supreme Court mainstay →“SCOTUSblog is something of an outlier in the quirky annals of digital media. Though blogging has fallen out of favor as social media has grown increasingly popular, SCOTUSblog, with its die-hard readership of legal obsessives, has remained curiously durable.”
The Verge / Som-Mai Nguyen
The Napalm Girl continues to define free speech →“‘The Terror of War’ is, after all, a violent, nonconsensual nude image of a child. It is also of tremendous historical importance — and before it became history itself, it was hard-hitting, weighty speech of a political nature. It is a troubling photograph that lives at the boundary of free speech; a difficult edge case for social media platforms that has come up time and again as they set, adjust, and modify their content moderation standards. The Napalm Girl photograph has left an indelible mark on how speech is governed, despite never establishing court precedent at all.”
The Guardian / Michael Savage
BBC launches satellite news channel in Myanmar after Trump silences VOA →“The BBC has stepped in to launch a news service in Myanmar after the devastating earthquake in the country, replacing a U.S. service that Donald Trump has ceased to fund. A direct-to-home satellite video channel delivering BBC News Burmese content will be launched to cater for what the corporation sees as an urgent ‘audience in need.'”
Substack / Corey Hutchins
The alt weekly Colorado Springs Indy lays off entire staff →“Last February, some were encouraged when a pair of wealthy local developers and businessmen, Kevin O’Neil and J.W. Roth, swooped in and resurrected the Indy and its counterpart the Colorado Springs Business Journal. They changed the papers back to a for-profit enterprise. They said they wanted a voice in the community … Along the way, the paper’s decades of digital archives vanished, creating a sinkhole in the civic memory. The resurrection wound up lasting a total of 14 months.”