As Facebook’s moves to fulfill its ambition to be the personal “newspaper” for its billion-plus members, is it likely to mean more woes for the ailing newspaper and magazine existence?
Today, there is no denying the fact that many traditional news media are already catching the cold and facing a mortal threat from the rise of the Internet. While they are faced with falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled from one generation to the next, no thanks to the recession which has intensified these difficulties, plunging newspapers into a tailspin from which some may not recover and others will emerge only as a shadow of their former selves. Obviously, the devastation is already substantial.
It is no longer a hidden fact that the internet has aided the rise and rise of internet news media, otherwise known as online media.
Apparently, Facebook, a huge social network has become a key source of news for many users, as part of a dramatic shift in how people get information in the digital age.
When the company founder, Mark Zuckerberg told a forum in early November that his goal is to make Facebook’s newsfeed “the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world,” many stakeholders could not hide the fact that such a move is likely to mean more woes for the ailing news media. The social media has about 1.3 billion users. To this end, early this year, it announced ‘Paper’, a stand-alone app that produces a customised newspaper featuring reports from across the globe. According to futurists, customised, personalised and curated content is the future. And FB, the biggest social media player today, has bigger, broader plans on this front.
Zuckerberg had said that while a newspaper provides the same information to every reader, Facebook could tailor its feed to the interests of the individual, delivering a mix of world news, community events and updates about friends or family.
“It’s a different approach to newspapering,” said Ken Paulson, a former editor of USA Today who is now dean of communications at Middle Tennessee State University.
“It’s neither good nor bad, but it’s something a traditional newspaper can’t do.”
With Facebook, editorial decisions about what members see are made not by a journalist, but an algorithm that determines which items are likely to be of greatest interest to each person.
This may concern the traditional journalism community, but even some media experts acknowledge that Facebook appears to be able to deliver more of what people want to see, in an effi cient way.
“It’s intimate, it’s relevant, it’s extraordinarily timely and it’s about you. That’s more than any newspaper can do,” said Alan Mutter, a former Chicago Daily Newspaper Editor who is now a consultant for digital media ventures said that as newspapers cling to their “ancient” business model, organizations like Facebook are making the news more personal.
And he said the trend will continue as younger readers shun print in favor of digital and mobile platforms.
Nikki Usher, a George Washington University journalism professor specializing in new media, said Facebook confi gures its news feed using an algorithm taking into account tens of thousands of factors.
“Facebook has all the data to tell you what all of your friends are reading, so you have a better chance of seeing things that you are interested in,” she said.
“The reason Facebook has so many engineers and data scientists is to continually make the algorithm better. The algorithm gets stronger as more people use it.”
Facebook is a source of news for at least 30 percent of Americans, and a major driver of traffi c to news websites, according to a Pew Research Center study.
This gives the social network enormous power over the news media, which is increasingly dependent on traffi c from Facebook and other social platforms.
Even though Facebook is known for its computer coding, it still must make editorial decisions, Usher points out.
“What’s scary is how reactive a position it puts news organizations, which are trying to guess Facebook’s next move,” she said. “That’s a lot of power to put in a single organization.”
Facebook, Google and other tech fi rms jealously guard their algorithmic formulas. But observers note that a single tweak of that formula can have important consequences for news organizations.
“News organizations are trying to build their strategy around trying to guess the algorithm, and ultimately that’s a losing strategy,” Usher said.
But with traditional news media hurting, it remains unclear how the industry can support the kind of journalism needed to keep people informed as it has in the past.
Mutter said what people read may change — it may be sponsored or subsidized in a transparent. “It won’t necessarily be real journalism, but it will be content,” he said.
Paulson said that while Facebook can deliver much of the information from newspapers, “it would be hard pressed to capture the soul” of traditional print news.
“Freedom of the press was established to keep an eye on people in power and inform the community,” he added. “There’s a tremendous public spirit component that you can’t address with an algorithm.”
Paulson said that while Facebook is a useful platform for sharing, it will not underwrite the kind of investigative journalism upon which newspapers often pride themselves. With journalism retrenching, that weakens the entire democratic process.
“We get the kind of news we deserve and are willing to pay for,” Paulson added.
With the coming of Facebook newspaper, the stream of news you see on your ‘wall’ will be tailored to suit your needs and interests.
It will fi lter all the junk. News consumption will become a very personal affair. Zuckerberg”s idea is simple. His idea is simple. Unlike a newspaper, Facebook can tailor its news feed to the interests of the individual, delivering a mix of world news, events and updates about friends or family. That would mean more eyeballs, enhancing consumer loyalty. And that also means more revenues from advertisements. But who’ll personalise it? The algorithm; it will scan your keywords, likes, comments, friends list and other elements to come up with what kind of news you’d like to read. As the algorithm gets perfected, you’ll be missing zilch in terms of what you want to read about. In actual sense, the personalised paper is never a new idea.
But it’s an idea whose time has just come. A few digital platforms offer similar services. Take paper.li for instance, it helps you create an online newspaper based on your social media feeds, keywords, and any topic of your interest in an easily organisable and negotiable fashion.
Paper.li —, which has been in action for over four years now and publishes more than 200 million articles a day — claims to be a content creation service, something Facebook too is trying to be. The difference is, in services such as paper.li, the organising is fi rst done by the user. Once the user sets the criteria, the algorithm will take control, producing the newspaper for you every day. But with FB, it’s done by the algorithm.
Would Facebook be producing content like a media company? The answer to this is no.
But the entire cyberspace is deluged by all kinds of content today and consumers are bombarded with a lot of stuff they just don’t want to see. Studies show that what is lacking in this space is the presence of a quality gatekeeper. That’s where Facebook enters. It has already tweaked its Feed algorithm to weed out cat photos and memos.
Zuckerberg now wants content creators to post their articles directly to its mobile app so that it can curate it and deliver it to users via news feed. This, Facebook feels, will save bandwidth and time and can help publishers win more readers for longer-durations. And that means business. While many felt the idea of Zuckerberg might be a winwin deal, Chris Duncan, chief marketing officer of News UK (an arm of News Corp) feels otherwise.
Duncan feels this would mean giving away content control to Facebook.
He calls posting content directly to FB a ridiculous idea. He terms it “a tax on navigation” and a “tax on audience”. For those publishers who have pay-to-access content, it’s a further tricky situation as it’s unlikely that FB users would entertain a pay wall. But these issues can be sorted out by technology.
And once that’s achieved, it will change the business of news delivery like never before, changing the contours of traditional media business forever, say media theorists. So, watch your feed!
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