May 23, 2014, 11:23 a.m. EDT
Facebook exec posts blistering critique of U.S. media
Mike Hudack, Facebook’s director of product, paints U.S. media as shallow
By Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch
Mike Hudack/Facebook Enlarge Image
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A Facebook executive just un-liked U.S. media, big time.
“Please allow me rant for a moment about the state of the media,” Mike Hudack, Facebook’s FB +1.44% director of product, began a Thursday post on his Facebook page .
Hudack then unleashed a blistering critique of pretty much every major U.S. media institution, from cable news giants, to newspapers and new-media pioneers.
CNN, he said, went from “the network of Bernie Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett,” which became famous for reporting from Baghdad in 1991 during the U.S. war against Iraq, to “the network of kidnapped white girls.”
He called today’s newspapers “ghosts in a shell” that have been “hollowed out,” with the exception of national publications like The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“Meet the Press” he dismissed as a “joke since David Gregory took over.” And the “salvation” he expected from the likes of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed never came around.
“It turns out that BuzzFeed’s homepage is like CNN’s but only more so,” he wrote.
“Listicles of the ‘28 young couples you know’ replace the kidnapped white girl,” he added referring to the growing popularity of articles or posts in the form of lists. “Same thing, different demographics.”
Hudack said he had high hopes for the online site Vox.
“I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy,” he said. “And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.”
Vox ran a story disputing Levi Strauss Chief Executive Chip Bergh’s suggestion that instead of washing jeans, people should freeze them to keep them clean to help save on water.
“It’s hard to tell who’s to blame,” Hudack said. “But someone should fix this shyt.”
Of course, there were plenty of reactions, some of them intense like one from Mother Jones political blogger Kevin Drum.
“I would have fired a product manager working for me who unloaded 500 words of bellyaching about why BuzzFeed does what it does with apparently no clue that the reason is his own product. Facebook,” he wrote. “Stupid click-baity headlines rule the internet largely because Facebook’s promotion algorithm chooses them for internet fame.”
More must-read stories from MarketWatch:
Rent a mansion this summer -- for your dog
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Benjamin Pimentel is a MarketWatch reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @BenPimentel.
Facebook exec posts blistering critique of U.S. media
Mike Hudack, Facebook’s director of product, paints U.S. media as shallow
By Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch
Mike Hudack/Facebook Enlarge Image
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A Facebook executive just un-liked U.S. media, big time.
“Please allow me rant for a moment about the state of the media,” Mike Hudack, Facebook’s FB +1.44% director of product, began a Thursday post on his Facebook page .
Hudack then unleashed a blistering critique of pretty much every major U.S. media institution, from cable news giants, to newspapers and new-media pioneers.
CNN, he said, went from “the network of Bernie Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett,” which became famous for reporting from Baghdad in 1991 during the U.S. war against Iraq, to “the network of kidnapped white girls.”
He called today’s newspapers “ghosts in a shell” that have been “hollowed out,” with the exception of national publications like The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“Meet the Press” he dismissed as a “joke since David Gregory took over.” And the “salvation” he expected from the likes of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed never came around.
“It turns out that BuzzFeed’s homepage is like CNN’s but only more so,” he wrote.
“Listicles of the ‘28 young couples you know’ replace the kidnapped white girl,” he added referring to the growing popularity of articles or posts in the form of lists. “Same thing, different demographics.”
Hudack said he had high hopes for the online site Vox.
“I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy,” he said. “And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.”
Vox ran a story disputing Levi Strauss Chief Executive Chip Bergh’s suggestion that instead of washing jeans, people should freeze them to keep them clean to help save on water.
“It’s hard to tell who’s to blame,” Hudack said. “But someone should fix this shyt.”
Of course, there were plenty of reactions, some of them intense like one from Mother Jones political blogger Kevin Drum.
“I would have fired a product manager working for me who unloaded 500 words of bellyaching about why BuzzFeed does what it does with apparently no clue that the reason is his own product. Facebook,” he wrote. “Stupid click-baity headlines rule the internet largely because Facebook’s promotion algorithm chooses them for internet fame.”
More must-read stories from MarketWatch:
Rent a mansion this summer -- for your dog
H-P rallies; analysts see profit gain from job cuts
Benjamin Pimentel is a MarketWatch reporter based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @BenPimentel.
