When Twitter said it would lay off 8 per cent of its workforce in October, it was the latest sign that the microblog's bid to become the global public sphere that its founders had envisioned, was failing.
User growth had fizzled out as newer, image-based services like Instagram and Snapchat took flight. Profits, once ready to blossom, were more elusive than ever. Its shares recently traded at an all-time low.
Analysts diagnosed the ailment: a bloated workforce producing a chaotic product that was more public nuisance than public tool.
Co-founder and new chief executive Jack Dorsey's cure? News.
“Twitter just reinvented the newspaper,” tech blogger Ben Thompson enthused about Twitter's new curated news feed service, Moments.
Social media has upended everything from telephones to television to the written word, and its ever growing scope also overlaps with journalism.
Media trade magazine Adweek called the transformation to being a real-time content hub “today's Holy Grail” for tech companies. Twitter's Moments has joined Apple's News app, Snapchat's Live Stories and Facebook's Notify in the latest quest for relevance and user views.
As traditional news outlets have struggled, news consumption in the US has remained strong. In 2015, tech companies saw an opportunity and doubled down on journalism projects, from the Google News Lab's plan to “help build the future of media” to Snapchat's feature feed Discover, which seemingly overnight became what one featured publisher reportedly called “the hottest ticket in town.”
Emily Bell, director of Columbia University's Tow Centre for Digital Journalism and former online director of Britain's Guardian newspaper called the new initiatives a “very important paradigm shift.”
“Platforms and distribution technologies which have been so beautifully developed, largely by companies in Silicon Valley, have become publishers themselves,” she said at a November conference on the news industry and social media.
“It doesn't mean they're doing the journalism, but they're certainly shaping what we do.”
The partnership is a tempting one for both sides.
For digital platforms, news is a lure to attract and keep users, while for news companies, social media is a conduit to billions of readers worldwide, with no added costs.
“The free distribution which all of these platforms represent is very attractive,” New York Times Company Chief Executive Mark Thompson said at the Tow Centre. Snapchat boasts about 200 million monthly views, more than three times that of the Times' own popular website.
But the line between hosting the news and reporting it has not yet been clearly drawn. At what point does “curating” news feeds become editing, and where does platform become publisher?
Social media workers “are not journalists, and don't claim to be, and I don't think they understand journalism as such,” the Times' Thompson said.
Social media's strategies to court audiences don't always sit well with journalism's focus on balance and objectivity. Social news feeds, traditionally tweaked by popularity, allow a dense economy story that might have made a traditional front page to be buried by clickable novelty news.
As social media's engagement with journalism grows, there are signs that the tech companies want to increase their editorial responsibility in 2016. Rather than compete with journalists, increasingly, they're working with them to shape their approaches to news.
Google is partnering with new-media journalism outlets in the US and Europe on a range of projects from academics to actual reporting. In February, it will announce the first of 150 million euros (163 million dollars) in funding for digital journalism in Europe through its Digital News Initiative.
Facebook in 2016 plans to expand its Instant Articles initiative to publish multimedia stories in collaboration with major news outlets. In addition, the network built its Signal toolkit to help journalists gather news - and solidify social media's place in newsgathering.
It signed an exclusive agreement with US broadcaster CNN to shape its debate coverage for the 2016 US election season, using the social networks' data crunchers to identify public concerns.
But where the interests of news media and social media diverge, the line between them is likely to blur even more - or disappear entirely.
Snapchat has 2016 election coverage plans of its own - and they don't involve traditional news outlets.
Instead, the former messaging app plans to report the news on its own, with its own, brand-new team of journalists.
DPA