The Year We Broke the Internet

Nothing new, but then it's 2013 review time: "this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world ... saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content ... Upworthy had about seventy-five thousand [Facebook] likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one whose headline misleadingly claimed doctors were injecting HIV into a dying girl to treat her cancer... Media malpractice like this didn’t trigger the collapse of traditional revenue models, but it’s hastening the job. Everyone wants everything for free now ... which means the companies don’t have any money to pay people to produce original work [which] ends up being significantly more disposable, which in turn makes the readers value it less, which means they want to pay less for it, and so on. It’s an ouroboros of shit." If you're looking for a bleakly accurate rundown of what 2013 meant to media and journalism, this Esquire piece is hard to beat.