Month: May 2022

Now and then, I like to remember some of the people and stories I have come across during my 35-year career in journalism, and one of the strangest — and most amazing — of them all was a guy named Chuck Fipke. When I came across him in Edmonton around 1989 or so, Chuck was an oddball loner with an almost impossible story: he claimed that there were diamonds in the Northwest Territories. And not just a few diamonds, but enough for a diamond mine. At this point, Chuck was mostly known for sleeping in his car while prospecting in the far north, and for baking soil samples in his oven at home.

The idea that there might be diamonds in the Northwest Territories might seem pretty straightforward today, since there are not one but three massive diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, which at their peak produced close to $3 billion worth of high-quality diamonds every year. But in 1989, this seemed like a crackpot idea that almost no one in their right mind — other than Chuck — believed was possible. It was like someone saying they’ve invented a time machine or a faster-than-light warp drive. It wouldn’t be overstating it to say Chuck was probably laughed at more than he was listened to.

Continue reading “Chuck Fipke, the man who struck diamonds”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reported its quarterly financial results, and said that while the number of Facebook users increased during that period, the company’s revenues grew at the slowest rate since Facebook first went public a decade ago. This news came on the heels of a similarly gloomy financial report in February, when Meta said that its profit shrank, and also announced that its user base fell for the first time since Facebook went public in 2012. After this report was released, the company’s share price plummeted, reducing Meta’s market value by almost $240 billion, the largest one-day decline in US history. The stock has recovered since then, but is still about 35 percent lower than it was in January.

In his remarks about Meta’s most recent results, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, tried to reassure investors and analysts that the social network still has a rosy future. He pointed to several things Meta plans to change, including a reduction in costs to help defray the company’s investment in the metaverse, since the unit devoted to those projects lost nearly $4 billion in the most recent quarter. Zuckerberg also talked about how the company plans to change the news feed at both Facebook and Instagram in order to compete with TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform that has grown at a rapid pace over the past few years (Facebook has also reportedly hired a PR firm to spread negative news stories about TikTok).

Many industry analysts believe TikTok has become a significant competitive threat to Facebook’s dominance. Meta has been “focused on its far-off vision for virtual existence [and] has been caught unprepared by the growing popularity of short-form video,” Tae Kim wrote at Bloomberg in February, after Meta’s stock fell. Instagram has its own short-form video feature, called Reels, which the company has been pushing as an alternative to TikTok, but while Instagram’s version is growing quickly, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on the Chinese company’s growth. TikTok hit the four-billion-user mark last year, a goal it reached almost twice as fast as Facebook, and its advertising revenue is expected to surpass both Snapchat and Twitter by 2024. Analysts believe that the app’s recommendation algorithm is the key to its success.

Continue reading “Facebook’s news feed: Fewer friends, more AI”