AsianScientist (Oct. 13, 2017) – Last week, the Asian Scientist team tore themselves away for their desks to attend the Media Publishers Association of Singapore (MPAS) awards. Apart from the six awards we actually won, we were likely to also have won “Nerdiest Table in the Room”, given our unusual concentration of people wearing glasses.
Publishing in a time of Google
But amid the high spirits and festivities, there was a gatecrashing elephant in the room. In his welcome address, MPAS president Mr. Olivier Burlot alluded to “two American companies” dominating the media landscape. Though never mentioned by name, we all knew of course that he was talking about Google or Facebook.
By some reckonings, 85 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising in 2016 went to either Google or Facebook. That left just 15 cents, mere crumbs under the table, for every other publisher in the world to fight over, from giants like Viacom to relative upstarts like Buzzfeed and even our own niche publication.
It’s safe to say that the industry is struggling. Our economic reality is one where the largest taxi company in the world owns no fleet, the largest accommodation provider owns no real estate and the most powerful media companies produce no content, a pithy quote attributed to senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, Tom Goodwin.
Survival of the viral
What’s a media company to do? It was disheartening to read former New Republic editor Franklin Foer’s frank account of how his initial idealism descended into desperation, “a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms.”
Like him, I am loath to resort to cheap gags and forever second-guessing an inscrutable algorithm, choosing words for their SEO value rather than their beauty or truth.
And yet, readers do seem to respond with a dreary predictability to headlines with “you won’t believe what happened next…” It’s actually not that hard to figure out what might be popular, but whether those articles are something I would personally be proud of is another matter.
Science in a post-truth world
Beyond the question of survival, the dominance of Google and Facebook also raises serious ethical questions. Facebook has admitted to showing over ten million people political ads from a Russian agency designed to sway the 2016 US elections. Google helped to spread misinformation about the recent Las Vegas shootings by leading users to a 4chan post claiming to reveal the identity of the shooter. In both cases, the algorithms were blamed.
For us at Asian Scientist, beyond just getting the facts right, we are concerned about more nuanced things like toning down exaggerated claims, concerns which tend to get drowned out in shouty headlines. For example, own coverage of the artificial womb story restricted itself to a discussion of how it could potentially be used for premature babies. Other media outlets went into more speculative zones, discussing possibilities which really weren’t warranted by the study, such as the implications on abortion, making females redundant etc. But those articles probably got more hits.
Making sense of the mediapocalyse
Having run this site for almost four years, I know that you are likely to be reading this post because you were directed here by Google or you clicked the link we shared on our Facebook page (thanks!). We—and I’m willing to wager, almost every other publisher in the room that day—are dependent on those “two American companies”, and there is not a whole lot we can do about it.
So have I escaped the publish or perish pressure cooker of academia only to land in the morass of a mediapocalyse?
Well, I’m happy to report that www.asianscientist.com has been online since 2011 without having to post cat video compilations. We are putting out more and more original content that we are really proud of and others are starting to recognize, too.
We have a mission and we plan on staying focused on it. While a niche site like ours may never see the number of likes a single viral cat video may garner, a recent report by Pew shows that science magazines like ours are trusted and sought out as a reliable source of information.
And that’s our goal: to deliver quality, fact-checked content that doesn’t make crazy claims. We think this is valuable and hope you do too.
This article is from a monthly column called From The Editor’s Desk(top). Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Pexels.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
