Journalism Has a Platform Problem

In the Good Old Days

I’m an infrastructure geek, especially information infrastructure. And this week I’ve been reflecting on a recent article by Julia Gitis in which she reports on the removal of the last newsracks from sidewalks in San Francisco.

Back when print was king, newspaper startups could enter a new market by placing newsracks to distribute their papers in places around town that got a lot of foot traffic. Passersby could see the headlines through the clear plastic windows of the newsracks and could be enticed to stop, put in a quarter or whatever, open the lid, pull out the top paper on the stack and continue on to the neighborhood coffee shop.

Sometimes, they’d read the paper over breakfast, pay their check and walk off, leaving the newspaper on the table. The dishes would be cleared, the table cleaned, and the paper folded back up and left on a surface by the front door, where it would be picked up by another customer who would take it to their table and read it over lunch.

The cost of starting a newspaper back then was a significant barrier to entry. But what we now call “discovery”—getting your new print product discovered and accumulating customers—was simply a matter of installing newsracks on sidewalks, or leaving stacks  on horizontal surfaces in coffee shops and laundromats. 

Like product discovery, distribution was under the control of the publisher. The logistics of printing the papers and getting them to newsracks, newsstands and bicycle delivery kids were well worn and time honored.

Then the Internet came along and all the foot traffic, which was really eyeball traffic, went online. 

Where once publishers had open access to sidewalks and other public places to display and distribute their products, online news and information discovery and distribution mechanisms fell under the private control of platforms—the digital spaces in which news and information consumers came to spend their time and attention. Far from being public assets, these platforms were owned by corporations or billionaires.  

The Theory of Platform Decay

Most people in the online news and information publishing industry would probably agree that we’re currently living in the late stage of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” theory of platform decay: 

“First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”

This describes the current state of Google search and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social platforms as well as Twitter/X and perhaps what we call Big Tech in general.

Google used to be a great search engine. You’d enter a search phrase and it would present a list of links to content out on the Internet which had the information you were searching for. You clicked on a link and your browser displayed the article or web page, fulfilling your query. It was magic.

Likewise, Facebook used to be a good place to share links to content out on the Internet that was of interest to you and your followers. 

Google and Facebook used to be good for journalism—legacy media used both to reach readers online, and discovery of digital journalism and diverse digital newsrooms was made easier.

Then, around the end of 2023, Meta decided it didn’t want to be in the link sharing business, and instead wanted to be in the attention harvesting business.  Links that  Facebook’s users shared suddenly didn’t appear in the feeds of their friends and followers—or only a few, and only after a while. Facebook came to understand that users clicking on links took them off their site, and decided that was bad for their business model. 

The platform that had made its bones by giving its users an easy way to share stories on the internet discovered that the longer they keep your attention by keeping you on Facebook, the more ads they could show you. 

And so, Facebook began to bury links. 

In fact, they don’t just bury links, they also censor them. One example is that links to stories about the media criticism site 404 Media being censored on Facebook are being censored on Meta platforms, which is, you know, pretty meta. 

Facebook and Instagram have recently doubled down by filling your feed with content posted by AI-generated “users” and random AI-generated images of users in their feeds. 

Likewise, in the last year, Google decided not to just present you with a list of links to external information sources that satisfied your needs. Because, again, helping you click on links to the primary sources of information took you off their site, and that was bad for their business model. Again, the longer they have your attention, the more ads they can show you. So they decided to display AI-generated summaries at the top of the paid result links on top of the links you really asked for to satisfy your query. (And I hope you enjoy eating a rock per day for health and that extra glue in your pizza sauce.)

Perhaps afraid of being left behind in the race to enshittification, Apple decided to also provide “Apple Intelligence” generated summaries for their news-alert product—with similarly awful results.

The issues of platform link deprecation and censorship, and the flooding of the zone with AI-generated BS, mostly impact discovery, which is the way people have found out about a newsroom or news product, which enables them to become new users or subscribers. 

This enshittification of search and social platforms make discovery harder and more expensive for newsrooms, but not impossible.

Thank goodness, then, for the open web, where digital news sites host their information. Once discovered and bookmarked, there’s nothing that can prevent the distribution of their product directly to consumers!

Right? Right?

Matt Mullenweg: Hold My Beer

Civilians will be excused for drawing a blank on this one. 

Allow me to introduce you to Matt Mullenweg. This longtime hero of the World Wide Web is CEO of the Automattic Corporation, which owns Wordpress.com, and founder and director of the Wordpress Foundation, which owns Wordpress’s trademarks.

Wordpress is an open-source content management system (“a factory that produces web pages”). It was first released in 2003 and has since grown over the years to power about 40 percent of sites on the web. 

Wordpress.com is a for-profit arm of Automattic, which hosts Wordpress sites for a fee. Wordpress.org is managed by the non-profit foundation and hosts the Wordpress core source code, and the repository of tens of thousands of third-party addons contributed by the Wordpress community of users and developers.

For all the intricacies of the Wordpress ecosystem—what parts are owned and operated by Automattic and what parts by the non-profit foundation—it’s all controlled by Matt Mullenweg.

Which used to be great—or at least not a problem. Then in September of 2024, it became a problem.  

The short story is that Mullenweg dragged the Automattic corporation and the Wordpress foundation into a fight with a Wordpress hosting company named WPEngine. WPEngine provides managed hosting in the cloud for millions of Wordpress sites and is thus a competitor to Automattic's Wordpress.com. WPEngine is also the contributor of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for Wordpress, which extends the functionality of Wordpress and is used by a large number of sites.

Mullenweg did some alarming things in just the last few months. Among the most alarming, he blocked access of the sites hosted by WPEngine to the repositories on Wordpress.org. I need to get into some weeds here: He blocked the official ACF plugin and force-migrated users to a copied version owned by Automattic. In the world of open source hosting and code development, this is a major transgression and is simply not done.

WPEngine sought relief in the courts, and a judge ordered an injunction requiring Wordpress.org to stop blocking access to WPEngine sites and to return control of ACF. 

Things are continuing to escalate since the injunction. It would be just another story of a platform owner wrecking a platform used by billions or millions of users, and a story of Mullenweg joining the ranks of other misbehaving zillionaires  … except for NewsPack.

NewsPack is owned by Automattic and was launched in 2019 to provide tools for newsrooms hosted on Wordpress sites. It was built with the support of the Knight Foundation, the Google News Initiative and the Lenfest Institute as part of an effort to create a “ready-to-go business and publishing offering that will let publishers dedicate more resources to their journalism.” Since then, it has come to be a preferred solution for hundreds of small to medium newsrooms because it’s good at what it does.

And that’s a problem because of Matt Mullenweg and his increasing erratic leadership of the Wordpress core ecosystem. More specifically, it’s a potential distribution problem for journalism on the open web.

What’s a Newsroom to Do?

Journalism is hard enough, but the sudden onset of platform enshittification is making it harder. The recent post-election announcement that Meta will be dropping fact checking is just going to add more misleading and deceptive content into the information ecosystem crowding out journalism.  The sudden-onset Mullenweg syndrome with Wordpress is bringing the stability of that ecosystem into question.

The online platforms are okay with disinformation, misinformation, lies, and, can you believe it now, Nazis. Or if not okay with, as Erin Kissane contemplates here, they’re just a bad shape for delivering a user-desired outcome. 

Either way, California Local is in the same boat as other newsrooms. How to most effectively be discovered and distribute our digital product.

And again, as an information infrastructure geek, I’m haunted by an issue witnessed in my hometown of Santa Cruz and recently documented by my colleague Eric in San Benito County, which is how a fact-based newsroom is to use facts to counter political disinformation and disinformation massively bombarding the local electorate. 

In the coming year, as we learn to navigate this new river of craziness, we’ll be sharing new lessons learned and new best practices gleaned by us and from our colleagues in the business.

We’ll let you know how it goes as we work to get into … good shape.

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