Every old media company story about new media companies is potentially rife with conflicts of interest. Keep this in mind at all times.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/new-york-times-ad-revenue-to...
The traditional consumption for news was through you reading a single newspaper/magazine. In a way you were tied to it, digitally this would work if you come and consume it from the media house itself. But platforms like FB/Twitter disrupt this. You have suddenly news from all different sources and this might lead to lack of attachment to a particular media house.
So a user might not bother subscribing or might cancel his existing subscription finding that he consumes the news anyway from different sources. This is scary for media houses as this makes them a commodity and FB/Twitter takes place of the central distribution source which they so happily sat at. I would agree with OP in that there is a big conflict of interest.
Over the course of the 2000s, the stock price of the NYT would drop to less than one quarter of what it was in 2000, and only start to climb back up in late 2016 and early 2017.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
PS: I am not a Facebook employee, and I don’t use their services. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t use information provided by the NYT to make a case against a direct competitor.
Also this kind of scrutiny is rarely applied to tech sector content being posted here. Given the libertarian anti-regulatory bent that most of them have you could just dismiss it based on conflict of interest.
My observation cuts both ways obviously. Presumably corporations have fixed advertising budgets. If they stop spending in one media space they'll reallocate spending to another.
Am I being too cynical? Perhaps. Firewall or not, by way off analogy: Tesla is Volkswagen's competition and Facebook is the New York Times's competition.
it doens't make sense at all to compare journalistic work to the competition between two companies who build cars.
This is just projecting techs broken culture on journalism. Carreyrou at the WSJ was investigating and in fact more or less brought down Theranos despite the fact that Murdoch was one of the largest investors in the company.
Don't take techs lack of ethics and mindless growth culture and assume everyone else operates in the same way.
What does Theranos have to do with this? The Wall Street Journal isn't competing with Theranos in the blood testing space. There's no conflict of interest in its reporting on Theranos from the perspective of the journalists. Carreyrou doesn't care about Ruper Murdoch's stock portfolio.
But they definitely are competing with Facebook, YouTube, etc. for viewers. Journalists know that time spent watching YouTube or reading Reddit means less opportunity for their own pieces to get attention. And their coverage of said platforms and people on those platforms in the past has often ranged from intellectually dishonest to outright dishonest. It's extremely hard to think that this conflict of interest isn't affecting their reporting.
There also is a difference between criticizing a newspaper and saying all "old media" are not to be trusted.