Liveblog: Why publishing might not be doomed by working with Facebook

Liveblog:

Why publishing might not be doomed by working with Facebook

Thu, May 14, 2015 at 7:06 PM by Dave Winer ☮.

Why publishing might not be doomed by working with Facebook

I just read Jeff Jarvis's piece about why he welcomes Facebook. I see it differently from him, and Emily Bell, who he cites. Here's my story...
While Facebook has been growing from nothing to 1.4 billion users, what has the news publishing business been doing? Mostly pretending they could keep doing what they were doing and somehow it would just work out.
The collective angst among journalism pundits, which wouldn't be worth a mention if a tech company did this to its developers, btw -- is missing one key idea, without which the depression is totally justified. The idea is this:
- THE OWNERS, ONCE FAMILIAR WITH WHAT FACEBOOK DOES, MIGHT COME TO REALIZE -- GEEZ LOUISE -- THIS DOESN'T LOOK THAT HARD. WHY DON'T WE DO THIS TOO??
It's sort of as if a baseball team realized one day that they could put some of their players in the field, to defend against the other team. The other team being the tech industry. Instead, they think it's over. We're dead for sure. And the thing is, until you realize you're dead, you aren't free enough to actually, for the first time in generations, be alive. ;-)
What's needed is that you open the gates for your readers, your sources, to publish through you. That's the secret to Facebook's success, and why they now own your distribution system. Their answer to mere people who wanted to write on their site was this: SURE! YES! BIENVENIDOS! THANKS FOR VISITING!
What the news industry said was: NO WE DON'T DO THAT.
The fact is today the cost of distribution today is as close to zero as it can get without actually being zero.
So what you do is take a page out of the tech industry playbook. The competing platform vendor says that in order to have a credible product, they need your apps (in this case your news stories). The right answer is sure, here they are. And now you learn how they do what they do, and you do it too.
The theory is this: You will be able to zig to their zag. There will be something they can't do because of who they are, either lack of expertise, or it would undermine one of the basic assumptions of their business, or they're just too busy being who they already are. In other words, a venture the size of Facebook that grew so quickly, must be leaving huge amounts of territory unoccupied. You just have to figure out what it is, and get there before they do. I believe you can still do it.
No one gets to be part of the future without taking some real risks, but that's what living is about. The depression and angst you're feeling is the comfort of the nest, realizing that you have to fly now, and make your own way in the world. You can't keep doing it the way your parents and grandparents did. That doesn't work anymore. Things changed.