Did digital media begin to die on Friday?

No sooner had Bertrand Borg from the timesofmalta.com spoken to the class about online journalism on Wednesday and held out the opportunity to contribute to the Times website but it seemed the digital media world began to fall apart. A chain of events began in the U.S., where the Trump administration swept aside a longstanding ban on newspaper publishers holding a licence for a television station in the same market. That led to much speculation about which old media company would acquire which, focusing attention on the fact that newspapers and television stations are worth buying because they still make money, just not as much as before the Internet came along

Then on Friday reports emerged that Buzzfeed, one of the most polarizing U.S. online news outlets for its successful formula of stealing content, would announce earnings 15-20 percent lower than expected because online ad revenues had stalled. Then it was reported that magazine publisher Ziff Davis was buying Mashable for $50 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider it was recently valued at five times that figure. Suddenly reports were seemingly everywhere of layoffs at digital media companies amid rumours that online earnings would come in lower than forecast. Fast Company called it a “digital media meltdown.” The Columbia Journalism Review declared that “winter is here for digital media.” press critic Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, tweeted that “something went crazy in the media bizosphere today.”

The influential blog Talking Points Memo is calling it a “crash,” noting that a recent “pivot to video” by publishers seeking elusive online ad dollars has proved fruitless. “Digital publishing has always been ruled by a basic structural reality. . . . There are too many publications relative to the funding available to support them, given that it has been almost universally assumed that the funding comes from advertising. That creates the furious competition for clicks and the ever growing intrusiveness of ads. The advertisers have all the power. So rates are always going down.”

The august New York Times, which is always quick to identify a trend, declared our “love affair” with digital media is over. “Like most relationships we plunge into with hearts aflutter, our love affair with digital technology promised us the world: more friends, money and democracy! Free music, news and same-day shipping of paper towels! A laugh a minute, and a constant party at our fingertips. Many of us bought into the fantasy that digital made everything better. We surrendered to this idea, and mistook our dependence for romance, until it was too late.”

Now there is instead a “growing mistrust of computers in both our personal lives and the greater society we live in,” noted the Times, not to mention alarm over digital technology’s “pernicious” eroding of our democratic institutions and the economic dominance of tech monopolies Facebook, Google, and Twitter. “Thankfully, the analog world is still here,” it added, “and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old-fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row . . . while ebook sales have been declining.”

Will the digital winter last? I guess only time will tell.