Press Independence in the Age of Algorithms
When a handful of private platforms determine whether people see a news outlet’s reporting, the freedom to publish is no longer enough. At Vertige Media, we’ve decided to take back some control.
In August 2023, Meta made a sweeping decision: it blocked people in Canada from viewing or sharing news content on Facebook and Instagram. The move came in response to a Canadian law designed to require major platforms to negotiate payments with news publishers. Three years later, the ban remains in place. Canadian newsrooms have kept reporting and publishing, but one private company, with a single decision, shut down one of the main ways people accessed their work. The consequences have been enormous. According to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, Canadian news outlets saw an 85% drop in interactions on Facebook and Instagram, including likes and comments, in the year following the ban. Research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue also found that, in Facebook groups discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opinion posts, images stripped of context, and misleading content became more prominent, while links to established news sources lost ground. Canada's experience exposes one of the central challenges facing journalism today: a news outlet can be free to report the news while remaining dependent on the companies that decide whether anyone sees it.
That dependence now shapes the entire media landscape. According to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, 54% of respondents across 48 markets say they use social media and video platforms to get news, compared with 51% who use news websites and apps. For the first time, platforms have overtaken publishers' own websites and apps as a way to access news, though many people use both. We've grown so accustomed to getting news through algorithms that it feels like a natural part of our daily lives. It's undeniably convenient. But that convenience obscures a political reality: what feels effortless to us depends largely on systems that make decisions we neither see nor control.
The Big Illusion
A recommendation algorithm is not an editor. It doesn't judge whether an investigation matters to democracy, whether a scientific discovery is significant, or whether the reporting behind a story is rigorous. These systems work, and sometimes fail, by predicting engagement based on signals such as reactions, how often people interact with content, and how long they watch videos. Meta explains this in its own documentation on recommendation systems. Those signals help predict what will hold our attention or provoke a reaction. They don't measure journalistic value.
Independence means more than resisting political or financial pressure. It also means being able to stand by editorial decisions, even when those decisions run counter to what the metrics suggest.
Of course, social media has broadened public debate, helped new voices find an audience, and given outlets like Vertige Media opportunities to grow that we never could have imagined. But that model comes with a constant vulnerability. According to Chartbeat data analyzed by the Reuters Institute, traffic from Facebook to news websites fell by 43% over two and a half years. Traffic from Google Search dropped by 33% between November 2024 and November 2025 across a sample of more than 2,500 websites, although the exact causes of that decline have yet to be fully established. More recently, the rollout of Google's AI Overviews, which display AI-generated summaries in search results, drove a drop in traffic to French news websites in September, according to a study by ACPM, the French organization that measures press and media audiences. A newsroom can work hard to improve its coverage and still lose a substantial share of its audience simply because an
intermediary has changed the rules.
That pressure can also change the journalism itself, in subtler ways. A 2025 study published in Journalism Studies, based in part on an experiment involving 412 journalists, found that audience metrics influence decisions about whether to keep an article prominently displayed after publication. The more time we spend watching dashboards and tracking a story's immediate popularity, the easier it becomes to confuse what succeeds in the competition for attention with what deserves a place in public debate. For a climbing and mountain publication like ours, these decisions come up every day. A spectacular image or a short-lived controversy can generate far more immediate reactions than an in-depth investigation. But popularity is a statistic. Importance is an editorial judgment.
Taking Back Control
The answer isn't to pretend that news websites are inherently serious while social media is inherently shallow. Websites can publish clickbait, and videos on social media can be backed by exceptionally thorough reporting. The real question isn't where journalism appears. It's who controls the relationship between a news outlet and its audience.
We're under no illusions: a new website won't magically make us independent.
When readers deliberately choose to visit a publication's website, subscribe to its newsletter, or financially support its reporting, the newsroom doesn't eliminate every intermediary. But it does become less dependent on the platforms that determine what people see. Independence means more than resisting political or financial pressure. It also means being able to stand by editorial decisions, even when those decisions run counter to what the metrics suggest.
That's the thinking behind our complete overhaul of Vertige Media. Launching our new website isn't just a technical or design upgrade. We want to build a place people actively choose to visit, where we can continue to use climbing as a lens on society, culture, and the environment, without having to reshape our journalism around whatever format happens to go viral.
We're under no illusions: a new website won't magically make us independent. We'll keep publishing on social media, studying our audience data, and asking you to share our stories so our ideas can reach more people. There's an obvious irony in using the tools of the attention economy to make the case for becoming less dependent on it. We recognize that contradiction, and we're comfortable with it. But we refuse to let those tools determine the value of our work.
Press independence is about more than the freedom to write. It also requires a real chance to be read. Until we're ready to share this next chapter with you, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter and take control of how you receive our reporting.
