Tech giants are killing journalism. Here's how to fix it.
A new study argues that Meta and Google have gutted professional newsrooms by capturing advertising revenue while producing no journalism themselves. The authors propose a targeted tax on Big Tech to fund traditional news outlets and restore public access to reliable information in an era of unvetted social media content.
Originaltitel: The rise and fall of journalism
<p>In this chapter, we study how the electronic revolution marked by the telegraph system and the digital revolution marked by the Internet impacted journalism and the public’s access to information. We suggest that the former network contributed to journalistic professionalisation and made factual and contextualised information widely available, while the latter enhanced journalistic deprofessionalisation and made access to reliable information difficult for the public. Currently, citizen journalists producing and sharing content on social media, including YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers, and podcasters, fail to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, do not check their sources, and are often unable to provide background information. Big Tech companies such as Meta and Google do not produce any public interest content yet absorb a huge portion of the advertising revenues. A policy solution may be to tax them and to channel the revenue thus generated to traditional news organisations.</p>