Mike Hudack

On any given day, you can open Facebook to find links to Jennifer Lawrence's late-night appearances, images of mocking cats, and lists featuring 25 turtle selfies. But why isn't anyone talking about the Ukraine election or the latest Chinese terrorist attack?

That's what Facebook's director of product management for Ads and Pages wants to know.

In a Thursday rant posted to his social media account, Mike Hudack (pictured) slammed the state of journalism, calling TV news institutions "a joke" and complaining about articles warning folks to wash their jeans, not freeze them.

"Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy," he wrote.

As many established media outlets struggle in a tough climate, Facebook itself has entered the news game, presenting FB Newswire, an aggregation service powered by Storyful that is aimed at journalists looking for newsworthy content to share and embed into their own articles.

The feature provides a function similar to how newsrooms utilize Twitter, where breaking news is spread faster than newspapers, TV newscaters, and websites can manage.

But it's that format that Hudack says makes the media lazy. "They [news organizations] seem incapable of breaking real, meaningful news at Internet speed," he wrote. "It's why they like Twitter so much. Twitter does the hard work for them."

Hudack kept the conversation going in the almost 200 comments, many of which included users' own rants defending or attacking the media.

As of press time, the post received 833 likes and 97 shares, and has become the discussion of many news outlets, including Vox.com, which Hudack specifically called out for publishing the "don't freeze your jeans" story.

Vox reporter Matthew Yglesias stepped into the ring, turning the spotlight on Hudack's employer.

"It is not hard to tell who is to blame for the fact that the jeans story (which is a great, interesting, informative story) got more readers than Andrew Prokop's excellent feature on the DATA Act," Yglesias said. "Facebook is to blame."

He pointed to social media sharing, saying that the jeans article earned more than 1,060 shares on Facebook, while the DATA Act story was served up only 242 times.

But despite the latter's prominent feature on the Vox homepage, the bulk of Web traffic comes from social media, Yglesias said, and the bulk of social traffic is driven by Facebook.

Facebook did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.