Are your online newsreading choices really your own?

Lopamudra Mitra Paul (43), a Kolkata-based mid-level HR professional working for a San Jose-headquartered IT company, has stopped being loyal to any newspaper. She follows different newslinks through Facebook.

She is not alone. Millions do the same worldwide, guided by technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple, which have emerged as the popular, if not the most popular, news intermediaries.

However, Jeffry Herbst, President and CEO of the Newseum and Newseum Institute in Washington DC, says “readers are getting one (-sided) perception of news because algorithms decide that what they read is the most read.”

The Newseum is an interactive museum of news and journalism and, the Newseum Institute explores the challenges confronting freedom around the world.

An algorithm performs automated reasoning tasks. In effect it acts as the editor of editors, removing the diversity in presentation of the same news from different perspectives in different newspapers.

The result is that the intimate relationship between a newspaper and its readers is lost.

Facebook determines which articles, how and what articles of the newspaper should be read.

Aftenposten , Norway’s largest newspaper, was therefore not far from the truth in describing Mark Zuckerberg as the “world’s most powerful editor” during the recent controversy over censoring the iconic Vietnam war napalm bomb victim’s photo.

“I think, the dream of social media flowering opinion is now diminished, Herbst said earlier this month, addressing the 2016 East-West Centre International Media conference in a Skype session from Washington.

He draws a live example from the ongoing US election debate, where “outrageous arguments are pushed to the front”.

The immediate casualty is print journalism as it loses both readership and revenue opportunity. Facebook gains by playing up a section of news.

“Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger believes that Facebook sucked up nearly £20 million (₹174 crore) of the newspaper's digital advertising revenue last year (2015),” Business Insider reported earlier this month.

Herbst doesn’t blame Facebook.

“Newspapers thought Facebook is a good solution to shore up readership. But Facebook is a company answerable to its shareholders...” so, the algorithms support Facebook’s cause, he said.

Herbst warns of more trying times ahead. “In the future, we have to be ready for more disruptions,” the Newseum chief said.

Some of the cracks are visible. Journalists are increasingly employed not by news companies but by non-news companies. What these journalists produce is “some form of news, but also a part of advocacy”.

“No one knows where this is heading. The revenue model of newspaper and radio is being challenged. In the US, people are trying many ways. But there is no solution as yet,” he says. Journalists are in a tight spot as they are expected to balance the profit of their news organisations and the public good.

So, how would should he try finding a way out of this mess? Herbst says there is no alternative to making readers aware of the maladies of algorithms.

According to him, “the subscription model” deserves attention. That means readers should pay for the digital copies of newspapers to get a balanced dose of news, bypassing the bias of algorithms.

Some top newspapers are already trying out this model.

But, a more convincing solution lies in creation of a non-profit social media that will not take recourse of algorithms to shore up its own revenue at the cost of news.

The question is who will create it?

COMMENT NOW