Learning to Live With Mark Zuckerberg

Nov 1, 2021
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“Each journalists and tech executives are responsible of considering Twitter is extra vital than it’s,” Ms. Lessin stated. “The tech executives are taking journalists’ tweets too critically in lots of circumstances — however on the similar time, it’s laborious to construct any skilled relationship with somebody who’s attacking you publicly all day lengthy.”

I’m unsure it’s at all times fairly as symmetrical as Ms. Lessin believes. Silicon Valley ideology generally strains up too conveniently with its earnings to be taken completely at face worth. And the business’s scale and energy are unmatched.

Ms. Lessin additionally famous that journalists and the tech giants are caught with each other at this level. Increased-ups in Silicon Valley, led by an influential Fb board member, Marc Andreessen, have spent years floating fantasies of changing the adversarial information media and interesting on to their shoppers and traders. However they’ve but to give you a platform that permits them to outdo the impartial information retailers in the case of speaking with their very own workers, a lot much less most of the people.

Mr. Andreessen’s enterprise capital agency, Andreessen Horowitz, invested within the social audio platform Clubhouse in that hope, solely to see it fade into an obscure international dwelling for multilevel advertising discussions. The corporate additionally began a media platform, Future, amid nervous newsroom chatter that the tech business “not wants” journalists. A number of months in, Future threatens nobody, although the agency’s head of selling and content material, Margit Wennmachers, advised me in a message on (Meta’s!) WhatsApp that each tasks are merely of their “infancy” and warned towards underestimating them.

Mr. Zuckerberg is conscious that he can’t but be fully freed from the mainstream information media. Whereas he gave interviews to solely 4 retailers final week, he quietly briefed greater than a dozen bigger information organizations, together with The New York Instances, earlier than his large “Meta” announcement, an aide stated.

The tech giants haven’t precisely withered below the information media’s scrutiny, both. Certainly, overlaying these firms, Ms. Lessin stated, requires a type of “split-screen.” Tech firms’ companies (in Fb’s case, promoting) have up to now been unaffected by all of the exposés and the federal government investigations that adopted. As journalists mocked Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse, the corporate’s inventory ticked up.

And so the battle between the media and tech industries is trying increasingly more like a stalemate. We could not all be spending the subsequent pandemic in Hawaii with Mr. Zuckerberg, however we’ll in all probability be residing with him some time longer.

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Supply- nytimes