Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.

The Metric Media network runs more than 1,200 local news sites. Here are some of the non-profits funding them.

<p>This is the first part of a two-part investigation. The second piece can be found here. As local news outlets across the US struggle to stay afloat, pop-up newsrooms are filling the void. Organizations with ties to political parties, special-interest groups, and lobbyists have emerged under the guise of news. One of the biggest such […]</p>

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem

Media Bias/Fact Check News

We are the most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. There are currently 3900+ media sources listed in our database and growing every day.

The death of the newsfeed — Benedict Evans

What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

Data from the controversial website Sci-Hub reveal that the whole world turns to it for journal articles.

Publishers fearing Facebook dependency: fight for your future, reinvent RSS.

Right now Facebook accounts for over 40% of all traffic for U.S. news organizations, making many dependent on the social network for…

Media Influence Matrix – The World's Most Reliable Influence Tracker

This week’s edition reads five FY2025 reports against each other: Dnevnik (Slovenia), Delfi Latvia, Phoenix New Media (China), Hanza Media (Croatia) and Digi Communications (Romania). It finds two publishers separating their journalism from their balance sheets, a Croatian publisher closing a 35-year-old political weekly on a 1.1% net margin, a Chinese state-linked digital news group whose financial centre has quietly shifted from advertising to mini-program reading apps, and a Romanian telecom giant’s having its news channel walk off the must-carry list.

Bluesky surpasses Threads and X as a referral traffic source

Bluesky drives three times more publisher traffic than Threads, some report: its open link-sharing policies offer an engaging alternative to restrictive platforms.

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.

The Tyee (@thetyee.ca)

Independent BC-based journalism swimming against the current. Paywall-free since 2003. support.thetyee.ca

60,000,000 Clicks for Copyright Reform | The Mozilla Blog

More than 100,000 people—and counting—are demanding Internet-friendly copyright laws in the EU   60,000,000 digital flyers. 117,000 activists. 12,000

Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021

Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...