Facebook and Google execs privately complain about the barrage of critical coverage they face, charging that media companies have a financial incentive to attack them and that media execs are settling scores. They’re right. […]
Many journalists live and breathe social media, so Facebook’s lapses and betrayals aren’t some distant calamity — they’re happening in reporters’ own backyards. Yet for all the ingrown enmity, traditional media and social media are more similar businesses than either are likely to admit right now.
Both involve providing a public good (reliable information, timely news, software services and interpersonal communication), then subsidizing the cost by selling the eyeballs of the people who consume that good.
Yup.
