The centrality of Facebook to the distribution strategies of online news outlets over the past decade cannot possibly be overstated; ask any journalist who worked on the dot-com side of a publication from 2010 until 2019 or so, and he will say that referrals from Facebook constituted the bulk of web traffic during that period. Once platforms “decided news was poison,” as Smith puts it, the party was effectively over.

But Smith glosses over an important step. Social media platforms didn’t just wake up one day and decide that’s it—no more news content. On the contrary, they were bullied into submission.

And the bully? Well, that was the mainstream media. Any story that attempts to explain the abrupt collapse of the online journalism model must reckon with the media’s starring role in its own demise. If BuzzFeed News–style journalism is dead, it was a murder-suicide.

[Jeffrey Blehar made a similar argument at NRO, which I linked in a previous headline. By hyping up the threat of “misinformation” on social media — a direct result of the Steele dossier nonsense — BuzzFeed News and other outlets dependent on social-media platforms essentially destroyed their own business model. — Ed]