{"id":11290,"date":"2015-07-01T01:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=11290"},"modified":"2024-12-07T13:31:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T18:31:03","slug":"heres-what-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-about-the-future-of-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2015\/07\/01\/heres-what-mark-zuckerberg-thinks-about-the-future-of-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the future of news"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Facebook has always had a somewhat fraught relationship with the news: Many users seem to think of the social network as just a place where they can see a friend’s baby or dog photos, but research shows<\/a> a growing number of people also get their news there. And co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants news to play a much larger role in Facebook, with features like Instant Articles<\/a>\u2014the mobile-news partnership with media outlets like the New York Times<\/em> that is rolling out soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a public question-and-answer<\/a> session that he participated in on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO reiterated his pitch for Instant Articles, saying the new feature is simply an attempt to help users consume more news by making those stories load faster<\/a> and look better on mobile devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“One of the biggest issues today is just that reading news is slow. If you\u2019re using our mobile app and you tap on a photo, it typically loads immediately. But if you tap on a news link, since that content isn\u2019t stored on Facebook and you have to download it from elsewhere, it can take 10+ seconds to load. People don\u2019t want to wait that long, so a lot of people abandon news before it has loaded or just don\u2019t even bother tapping on things in the first place, even if they wanted to read them.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published\u00a0at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In other words, all Facebook wants to do is help media companies. Not everyone is buying this explanation, however. When you are as large and all-encompassing as Facebook, even something that seems like a gesture of friendship can take on a much more ominous tone. Veteran media and technology writer Dan Gillmor, for example, thinks news companies<\/a> are striking a devil’s bargain:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I’ve tried to explain before<\/a>, the risk with an offer like Facebook’s is that it gives media outlets something they desperately need\u2014namely, a chance to reach a massive audience with their content, and a share of the advertising revenue\u2014but at a potentially huge cost. Many users already think of Facebook as the place where they get their news, not the individual news outlets who actually produce that content. What happens if that process accelerates? Facebook ultimately wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his Q&A<\/a>, Zuckerberg said that one of the things Facebook offers is the traffic it can send to publishers who participate in the Instant Articles program (interestingly enough, he didn’t mention the advertising revenue aspect). When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, he said: “People will naturally read a lot more news. That will be good for helping people be more informed about the world, and it will be good for the news ecosystem because it will deliver more traffic.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone is convinced by this argument either, however. And their skepticism may have been increased by the recent news that The Huffington Post\u2014which says it gets more than 200 million unique visitors a month and produces close to 2,000 articles every day\u2014is reportedly only breaking even<\/a> on its editorial operations. How much is more traffic really going to help those news partners, assuming it arrives?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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i can't eat traffic. https:\/\/t.co\/jc2Z3GmIu2<\/a><\/p>— Jack Marshall (@JackMarshall) June 30, 2015<\/a><\/blockquote>