Newsonomics: On end games and end times

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[Commentary] We’ve read so many obituaries for news media over the past 10 years that you’d think we’d be inured to yet another. But the onslaught of off-site distribution initiatives -- from Facebook’s soon-to-expand Instant Articles to Apple News to Snapchat Discover, and most recently Twitter Lightning and whatever may next emerge as an offspring of Google News -- now offers yet another existential moment. Will anyone go directly to a news or media site or app in 2020? Or are the platforms, now becoming quasi-publishers, all that will matter? Of course, the big question is what the money will look like when the dust settles. Will this round of changes stop or deepen the struggles of print-based companies?

Overall, this new age of distribution may be a significant historical marker, as long as publishers try to take the future in their own hands and don’t expect Facebook to come up with its own brainstorm to “save” the news industry. As Mark Zuckerberg took questions on Facebook on June 30, he said all the right things -- and showed himself to be as uncertain as publishers on where all this would or could lead. “There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces,” he wrote. “This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet.”


Newsonomics: On end games and end times