5/22/22, 6:36 PM
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s future, fake news, and Russian mischief - Vox
about, then that’s going to build a stronger community and build a stronger business,
regardless of what Wall Street thinks about it in the near term.
Javier Zarracina/Vox; Richard Drew/AP
Ezra Klein
I want to ask you another question about the advertising model, and this one is trickier
because it bears very directly on my industry. Something I’ve seen recently has been a
perception at Facebook that a lot of the critical coverage from the media comes from
journalists angry that Facebook is decimating the advertising market that journalism depends
on. And there is that view. The publisher of Dow Jones, Will Lewis, said that the diversion of
advertising dollars into Facebook and Google is killing news and that it has to stop.
Is he right or wrong? And given that so much of the advertising on Facebook wraps around
news that journalism organizations are paying to report and publish, what responsibility do
you feel you have to the people creating real news for their business model to work, given
that their products create value, not just for the world but for Facebook itself?
Mark Zuckerberg
So I do think a big responsibility that we have is to help support high-quality journalism. And
that’s not just the big traditional institutions, but a big part of what I actually think about when
I’m thinking about high-quality journalism is local news. And I think that there are almost two
different strategies in terms of how you address that.
For the larger institutions, and maybe even some of the smaller ones as well, subscriptions
are really a key point on this. I think a lot of these business models are moving toward a higher
percentage of subscriptions, where the people who are getting the most value from you are
contributing a disproportionate amount to the revenue. And there are certainly a lot of things
that we can do on Facebook to help people, to help these news organizations, drive
subscriptions. And that’s certainly been a lot of the work that we’ve done and we’ll continue
doing.
In local news, I think some of the solutions might be a little bit different. But I think it’s easy to
lose track of how important this is. There’s been a lot of conversation about civic engagement
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge
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