Facebook won’t call itself a media company. Here’s how it can still support journalism - The Verge

Perhaps there's an opportunity for Google (or Amazon, or Apple) to disrupt Facebook and Twitter in this domain, if it is willing to operate as a socially responsible media company. The article subtitle: "Getting platforms to pay for the Fourth Estate"

On a related note, see Introducing a smarter and more beautiful Google Play Newsstand (Google Blog) and Facebook, Google, Twitter et al need to be champions for media literacy (Dan Gillmor)

"There are good reasons why Facebook doesn’t want to be a media company, and the reasons, he said, are not simply legal or regulatory. It’s also a matter of brand management, talent, revenue, and regulation, in that order. "It’s cooler to be a tech company," he said. And consumers want cool. Tech status helps attract talent. "Legacy media have reputations as bad places to work." As a business model, if defined as media, ad revenue will be scrutinized, and, Mele predicted, "regulation will force them to address how they meet the public sphere, which will increase [employee] headcount and increase rates."

In his 2016 book Free Speech, Timothy Garton Ash calls Facebook and Google superpowers, built exclusively on a profit model absent the moral and legal mechanisms of accountability that exist for traditional media. They control vast privately owned public spaces. They do not have the formal lawmaking authority of sovereign states. There is no formal mechanism of accountability. Their leaders are not accountable to their users. "Yet their capacity to enable or limit freedom of information and expression is greater than most states.""

Facebook won’t call itself a media company. Here’s how it can still support journalism - The Verge