First up the headline story:
The idea that the value of a piece of news is defined by likes and comments — that taking in information without getting into a back-and-forth with your uncle about it is somehow unworthy — is actually a profoundly ideological statement
I gave a talk at NYU’s Studio 20 last month. It was a review of the year in journalism innovation; I’ve given it at the program’s graduation each of the past four years. It’s a nice opportunity to look back over the past 12 months and see what mattered.
I headlined the first section of my talk “OUR FRIENDLY NORTHERN CALIFORNIA OVERLORDS” and went through some of the highs and lows in Facebook’s relations with the news business. The evolution from “fake news on Facebook didn’t affect anything” to “sorry, didn’t mean to be so dismissive.” The steady decline in Facebook traffic to major news sites. The “experiment” where Facebook decided to screw around with the journalism ecosystem in six countries — each with its own relatively recent history of civil war, dictatorship, or just fragile democracy — by shipping most news out of the News Feed.
The last slide of that section was just one sentence: I kinda think Facebook wishes it wasn’t in the news business.
That felt at least a little controversial at the time. People forget that the “News Feed” wasn’t originally meant to be about news, at least as editors define it. Facebook (and its sidekick Instagram) today have literally billions of people creating #content, things their friends want to see or read, for free; meanwhile, real news was just one hassle after another. Publishers complaining about money! Conservatives complaining about bias! Its own employees complaining about electing Donald Trump! Facebook had become the single largest distributor of human attention in the history of the world, and it seemed like professionally produced journalism was almost more trouble than its worth.
You started to see this in 2015, when Facebook announced it would be boosting content from friends and family over content from Facebook pages, like news organizations. In 2016, a newly proclaimed set of “News Feed Values” emphasized that “friends and family come first.” In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg spent a lot of energy talking about Facebook’s role in building communities, writing that “I want to emphasize that the vast majority of conversations on Facebook are social, not ideological. They’re friends sharing jokes and families staying in touch across cities.”...MORE
And:
Facebook drastically changes News Feed to make it “good for people” (and bad for most publishers)
News publishers that have relied on Facebook for traffic will suffer.
Facebook is making big, immediate changes to News Feed. The company will now prioritize content from friends, family, and groups over “public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post Thursday night. News publishers that have relied on Facebook for traffic will suffer: “Some news helps start conversations on important issues,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.”Personally, I think the arguments in last Monday's ""Facebook Can’t Be Fixed" (FB)" make the most sense.
The change, Facebook admits, is major. Users will be given “more opportunities to interact with the people they care about,” which necessarily means less publisher content, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a post Thursday:
Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.“News remains a top priority for us,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, claimed in an email to large publishers, adding, “News stories shared between friends will not be impacted.”...MORE
As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.
