NBC News slams Facebook — calling it 'Fakebook' — while heaping praise on Snap (FB, SNAP)

Gadi and Savannah_preview

Executives from NBC News buried Facebook over its dealings with media companies and heaped praise on Snap.
The news organization said Facebook, which it called "Fakebook," had been a "bad actor" when it came to its actions toward the news industry.
"They don't have any value to publishers," said Andy Lack, the NBC News chairman.
Lack wondered whether the US government would put more pressure on Facebook to rid its platform of fake news and misinformation.

NBC News doesn't think very highly of Facebook, and it isn't holding back.

At an event on Wednesday, the news division's group chairman, Andy Lack, and its senior vice president of digital, Nick Ascheim, were critical of Facebook's relationship with the media industry, questioning whether the social network has any real interest in the news business or in dealing with the myriad problems it faces related to fake news and misinformation on its platform.

The two executives expressed a growing frustration about working with Facebook over the years and cast doubt on the prospect that the tech giant would ever help media companies make money. Lack said NBC executives had even taken to calling Facebook "Fakebook."

Ascheim described Facebook as "just a marketing vehicle."

"We don't put our content there because we don't think they value premium content the way some of our other partners do," he said.

"They don't have any value to publishers," Lack said. "That's the dirty secret."

Lack added that Facebook "takes all the value out" of content.

NBC isn't just mad about Facebook's algorithm

Ascheim said NBC News' position wasn't a reaction to Facebook's recent algorithm changes to favor posts from friends and family instead of content from news organizations, hitting media companies hard.

"We've taken this position with Facebook for a long time," Ascheim said, adding that NBC News officials had numerous conversations with Facebook behind the scenes about the issues well before the algorithm tweak.

"We weren't seeing any progress," he said. "We're certainly not alone in that."

And after years of living in fear of losing Facebook's digital-distribution power, media executives — including leaders at Vox Media and BuzzFeed, and even Rupert Murdoch — have more regularly spoken out against the platform.

As Facebook looks to court news organizations to produce content for Facebook Watch, NBC executives said they'd listen to such a pitch but had doubts.

"We're hopeful," Lack said.

"But decreasingly hopeful," Ascheim added.

Ascheim said Wednesday that when evaluating digital-distribution partners, NBC looked at three things: traffic, revenue, and brand value.

Facebook was "checking no boxes," he said.

NBC News is in love with Snap

Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube and Apple News are checking more of those boxes for NBC News.

And though Lack and Ascheim were tough on Facebook, they heaped praise on Snap (in which NBCUniversal has invested) as a strong media partner.

The network's daily Snapchat series, "Stay Tuned," has garnered 5 million subscribers since launching last July, the two executives said. The show, designed for the Snapchat app, features two hosts with little previous TV experience but is "off to an unbelievable start," Ascheim said.

In February, "Stay Tuned" generated 125 million video starts, meaning people watched at least one snap (or roughly 10 seconds). The show has also reached 33 million unique viewers, Ascheim said — and importantly, a large number of people are watching at least three days a week, a figure that "has grown tremendously."

Already this month, the show's on pace to "destroy those numbers," Ascheim said, despite some publisher complaints about Snapchat's recent redesign.

Lack said the quick, mobile-centric formats that have clicked for "Stay Tuned" could prove to be game changers in news.

"I've been chasing millennials for a better part of a quarter-century — most of them aren't millennials anymore," he said, adding that millennials, generally defined as people born between 1981 and 1996, "are the most elusive" demographic for news organizations to reach.

Yet most of NBC News' audience on Snapchat is under 25.

Moreover, Lack raved about how collaborative Snap's team has been in both developing the show and creating an equitable business relationship — particularly compared with Facebook.

mark zuckerberg "What's frustrating to me about Facebook is you can't have a relationship with them," Lack said. "You can't have a partnership with them. They don't really have any interest in content in the way that we do. They are distributors.

"I don't think they are good actors in the game for us as news providers — or anyone, quite frankly, who's providing quality content. That's a problem across the board."

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook needs to take more responsibility, NBC News says

Lack said there were only two things Facebook seemed to respond to: pressure from advertisers, and fear of government intervention.

Facebook has been under fire from many corners over its role in the 2016 US election and its policing of fake news on its platform.

Lack stopped short of calling for regulation of Facebook but implied it was held to a different standard.

He recalled when top NBC News officials were called before Congress after the 2000 presidential election, when the broadcast networks had to backtrack from calling the extremely tight race between George Bush and Al Gore too early.

Lack pointed out that Facebook had more recently sent some technology executives to testify before Congress.

"I haven't seen Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg sit in any of those chairs," Lack said.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The science of why human breasts are so big