"... it can send monsoons that make the crops grow or a parching drought that brings famine, and it never has to explain why."
Just as the ancients looked to animal bones and cloud shapes for clues to the gods’ intentions, news executives and the journalists who work for them parse every utterance out of Menlo Park for insight into the company’s thinking.
So when a high-ranking product manager takes to his Facebook page to condemn the efforts of the most successful digital publishers, you better believe they’re going to pay attention.
That's Jeff Bercovici at Forbes, talking about some rant put up by a Facebook guy named Mike Hudack. Bercovici quotes a lot of the rant, including this, about Ezra Klein and Vox:
Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy.
And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.
And Ezra Klein himself deigned to drop a comment chez Hudack:
It’s funny: last night, we were having a conversation around the mix of content on Vox. And we were saying that if you just looked at what worked well on FB it was a lot lighter than if you looked at what was on the site. We actually try pretty hard not to be swallowed up by those incentives. But it’s a bit baffling to read a post by Facebook’s product director that just ignores the fact that those incentives exist.
What?! Facebook doesn't purport to be a news site transforming the news. Why should
Hudack's critique of news media need to include an acknowledgment of such a mundane, banal reality? If Klein actually finds it "baffling" that Hudack didn't cut him some slack for plying readers with candy, he's utterly stupid. I don't think he is stupid. He's just not capable of delivering the website he promises and lacks any good excuses.
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