https://www.npr.org/2021/04/02/983211972/this-news-publisher-quit-facebook-readership-went-up

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This News Publisher Quit Facebook And Readership Went Up Many media
outlets feel they need to be on Facebook to reach people. So why did
New Zealand's biggest news publisher decide to go it alone?
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This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up

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This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up 3:34

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This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up

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April 2, 20215:00 AM ET
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Shannon Bond

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This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up

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[gettyimage]
Enlarge this image

Sinead Boucher, the owner and CEO of New Zealand publisher Stuff,
says the decision to quit Facebook has been beneficial for the
company. Marty Melville/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
Marty Melville/AFP via Getty Images

Sinead Boucher, the owner and CEO of New Zealand publisher Stuff,
says the decision to quit Facebook has been beneficial for the
company.

Marty Melville/AFP via Getty Images

Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, Sinead Boucher offered $1
to buy Stuff, New Zealand's largest news publisher.

Boucher was already the company's chief executive and was worried
that its Australian media owner would shut down the publisher. Things
had started to look really grim: The economy had ground to a halt and
advertising revenue had evaporated.

"I knew that they ... would potentially just decide to wind us up,"
said Boucher. "So it was just a punt."

The punt worked. The Australian company accepted the offer of 1 New
Zealand dollar, worth about 70 U.S. cents. Just like that, in May,
Boucher found herself the owner of the most popular news website in
New Zealand and about 50 local, regional and national newspapers and
magazines.

One of the first decisions she made as owner was to break up with
Facebook.

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Facebook Blocks News In Australia Over Government Plan To Force
Payment To Publishers

How Boucher reached that point illustrates just how complicated the
relationship between Facebook and news publishers has become over the
years.

Stopped all posts on Facebook and Instagram

Boucher had worked for years as a reporter and editor before moving
into management. She saw the change of ownership as an opportunity to
rethink Stuff's approach to covering the news in New Zealand and to
focus the company on building trust with readers.

"People sometimes say to me, 'It must be so stressful now, owning the
company,' " she said. "Actually, in a lot of ways, it's been
liberating because there is a freedom in being able to make your own
decisions, for better or worse."

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Pandemic

The Coronavirus Crisis

Facebook Pledges $100 Million To Aid News Outlets Hit Hard By
Pandemic

Stuff's decision to quit Facebook did not come out of the blue. In
2019, after a horrific mass shooting at mosques in Christchurch, New
Zealand, was livestreamed on Facebook, the company began to
reconsider its relationship with the social network and stopped
spending money to advertise there.

Just over a year later, in July 2020, Stuff launched a new
experiment: its website, newspapers and magazine stopped posting
anything at all on Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram.

Boucher said the company was increasingly questioning whether being
on the social network was "compatible" with its new focus on trust.

"We still felt uneasy with a lot of the decisions Facebook has made
or a lot of the things they turned a blind eye to," she said, such as
hate speech and misinformation.

Overall traffic rose, even though social media traffic fell

But this decision was also risky: Almost a quarter of Stuff's traffic
came from social media -- and mainly from Facebook. "We were expecting
that it would bring a significant drop in our traffic," Boucher said.

Those fears never materialized. While Stuff's social media traffic
did drop, overall traffic went up.

Boucher attributes that in part to 2020 being such a busy news year,
from the pandemic to global racial justice protests to big elections
in New Zealand and, of course, the U.S.

"If we had remained on Facebook, we might have had another 5%
growth," she said. "But even if we throttled our growth ... it's
brought us a lot of positives."

Donations from readers went up, for example, once word of Stuff's
decision leaked out. Boucher said the company's newsrooms felt the
impact, too.

"We can definitely see a change in the way people react to us and
talk to us" she said. "Hearing anecdotally from journalists, they
feel like they've been able to get interviews they would not have got
before. They feel that it has really has contributed to people
trusting us more, thinking about us as an organization with a clear
set of values."

A one-month pause turns into a long-term breakup

The Facebook pause was supposed to last a few weeks. It's now been
more than eight months -- and Boucher says she has no plans to return
to Facebook.

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Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving On Facebook. A New Study Shows
Just How Much

Breaking up with Facebook is not an easy decision for any publisher.
Many news outlets feel they need to be on Facebook to reach people. A
third of Americans say they regularly get their news on the social
network, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time, the
news business is in real financial trouble because a big chunk of
advertising dollars now go to Facebook, as well as Google.

In fact, Facebook has become such a dominant force in how people get
information that some governments are trying to force the social
network to pay media outlets for news stories. Facebook recently
protested a proposed Australian law by briefly cutting off all news
from the continent. (The social network backed down after the
government made some changes to the measure.)

Facebook says the dynamics of its relationship with publishers are
widely misunderstood -- that, in fact, publishers need the social
network more than it needs them.

But Boucher says her experience suggests publishers should prioritize
a different relationship: the direct one they have with their
audience.

Fears that Stuff would collapse were "baseless"

Still, she isn't willing to say never. She describes the move as "an
ongoing experiment rather than a black and white permanent decision."
That's because she worries about one big downside: If Stuff is not
posting its stories on Facebook, does that leave a hole that will be
filled by false or misleading information?

"We're really conscious that a lot of people still use the platform
as a primary way to access news and information," she said. "We
wonder about the risk of withdrawing journalism from Facebook and
what that leaves behind for people to be exposed to, particularly
around things like COVID vaccine."

Even so, Boucher says she is confident she made the right decision.
And she says that while Stuff is one company, in one small country,
it has a lesson for publishers of all sizes: There is life beyond
Facebook.

"Taking that step and deciding to just give it a go taught us so
much," she said. "All our fears that without these platforms, we
would just collapse -- that was baseless."

Editor's note: Facebook and Google are among NPR's financial
supporters.

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