Is Your Newspaper Named Facebook?

decline, done in by the Internet, is not news. But here we are told that rather than turning to the newsgathering sources that have all replicated themselves on the Internet, people are turning to a single source that filters the news for them. And for a sizeable number it is likely to be their only source for news, given that — according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an April earnings call — users worldwide spend a jaw-dropping average of 50 minutes a day on Facebook, leaving little time to surf for news elsewhere.

Accounts of the Trending kerfuffle attempted to explain how Facebook goes about its filtering for both that relatively new feature and for its News Feed, but with fragmentary knowledge of proprietary methods. The News Feed is the jumble that runs down the center of the principal Facebook page. What news appears is commingled with the baby pictures, the happy birthdays, the photos from vacationing friends.

For news, the service taps a list of a thousand trusted sources says one account; another cites a much shorter list of recognized media names that are given added weight. Whatever is discovered is then given a "relevancy score" different for each user based on people you’ve "friended" who have shared content or commented on past posts, and news and other material that you've "liked" — probably directed to it by a prior Facebook News Feed item. All this tailoring means "No two users see the same News Feed or Trending items", says the Wall Street Journal.

So not only is news filtered and selected for the Facebook population at large, it is further winnowed to only information you and a circle of friends have indicated you would like to see. The tendency would seem to be an ever-narrowing vortex reducing what one sees to only the common interests of a circle of friends. Eli Pariser, who runs the website Upworthy, saw this coming in 2011. His book, "The Filter Bubble, What the Internet Is Hiding From You", warned that our every click and keystroke channels what comes next, weaving a kind of customized cocoon that, by serving up just what we like, closes off most of what else is going on in the world. A dangerously ill-informed public results.

Consider what else this means. First consider the newspaper. There are those who glance at the front page and go immediately to the crossword, never to return. Some may restrict their choice of reading to an index, such as the blurb list on the front page of the Journal. But most turn the pages. They see all that's new, in all categories, a broad selection of news topics because newspapers and magazines deliver content. While heavily reliant on advertising, they have always charged the reader for subscriptions and the public has historically found them worth paying for. For their Internet versions, just about all have overcome the "information wants to be free" foolishness of the early web and have erected pay walls.

Now consider Facebook and all the rest: Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, and so on. All of them are entirely dependent on advertising. None of them charge their users a cent, and it is worth wondering what would happen to them if they were suddenly to demand a monthly fee, however modest. It raises the question of whether they thrive only if free. Certain of them — Pandora, Spotify, for example — have tried to "monetize" with a second tier free of advertising in exchange for a monthly charge, but they've had trouble getting any more than a small percentage of their listeners to pay up.

What we are alerted to by the 63% revelation is that the free social media (most have news feeds of their own) are diverting the users away from the for-money news-generating websites and into their no-charge filter bubbles where they can feed off the news providers and skim the advertising revenue for themselves.

Whether Facebook (to continue only with Facebook for convenience; it's by far the biggest) gathers from a thousand sources or a couple of dozen, few items are picked up from any given publication. Not only do social media users generally miss all else that is to be found at actual news sites, but Facebook parasitically summarizes the news it has found in a short abstract. One suspects that is as far as typical Facebook users go. They get the gist and skip going to the news site to read the full article where their page views would have counted toward attracting the advertising that pays for the ranks of journalists who actually do the work of finding out what is afoot in the world.

As Facebook's dominance rises, far fewer will visit than the big circulation that newspapers have always needed to cover newsgathering costs. And it's questionable whether those who do follow a news item into its news site do much roaming in the rest of the publication while there. Moreover, the number who do click through to the publication presumably arrive as guests. The user eludes the pay wall; the news organization misses out on that revenue.

Not even this arrangement is good enough for Facebook. They dislike anyone leaving their site and have negotiated deals with publishers so desperate to retain an audience as to allow Facebook to suck their content into its own innards. "Hosting" is the polite name given to this usurpation. Moving it inside means users no longer need tap a link on their smart phone to go to the publisher's site. "Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous", wrote The New York Times in an article describing its own negotiations to enter into what seems like a suicidal deal. Facebook intimates that the Times and others who succumb would make money from advertising running alongside the articles, but note the transformation. The publishers will have been absorbed; they will find themselves working for Facebook, vying to create material that the leviathan will pick up. Facebook becomes the universal newspaper.

The construct would not seem to hold promise for the future of journalism. It certainly does not support the costly investigative, adversarial role of journalism in uncovering what the world would rather keep secret. With each year won't we discover that less and less is reported on what goes on in the dark corners of the world? And how will we know?

Facebook and its ilk may someday and discover that, as a result of its choke hold, the revenue stream has been so thinned that there are no newsgathering organizations left to feed the beast. They might just have to pay for journalists and journalism for a change.

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