The New Yorker:

As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.

By Kyle Chayka

Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke. For much of the past decade, publications’ home pages were rarely the focus of attention; journalistic outlets relied on social media to distribute what they published. The Verge is an outlier in that it invested heavily in its home page when it was out of fashion to do so. In 2022, it launched a dramatic redesign that was meant to make its site a more dynamic destination; it included a “Storystream” of short posts and visual highlights, similar to tweets, that provide dozens of updates a day in real time. The new Verge looked less like a traditional publication and more like a social-network feed, which initially struck many industry observers as ludicrous. Why bother trying to do what the social platforms already do better? The home page was dead. TikTok was the future.

“The immediate reaction was ‘This is doomed to fail, no one will ever go to a home page again,’ ” Patel recalled. Then Twitter imploded under the leadership of Elon Musk, and all of the major social platforms pivoted away from news distribution. In the end, The Verge’s redesign worked. According to the company, the number of “loyal users” (defined as those who have five or more sessions on the site in a calendar month) increased by forty-seven per cent in the course of 2023. Though it is not a general-interest title, The Verge continues to be the most visited single site under the umbrella of Vox Media, its parent company. One could argue that its makeover, which has now become a subject of admiring chatter among media executives and the editors who work for them, heralds the revenge of the home page.

The major social platforms operated for a long time like digital big-box stores for media content, offering a little of everything all at once. Twitter, especially, served as a one-stop shop for news and entertainment among a certain kind of very online user. In the twenty-tens, the conventional wisdom was that content was best distributed to consumers by social platforms through algorithmically personalized recommendations. You read whatever news surfaced in your Facebook or Twitter feeds. News articles circulated as individual URLs, floating in the ether of social-media feeds, divorced from their original publishers. With rare exceptions, home pages were reduced to the role of brand billboards; you might check them out in passing, but they weren’t where the action lay.

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