© Matt Rourke/APFacebook is changing its news feed to promote posts by family and friends over items from publishers.
For many news organisations this was a confirmation of what they had already been experiencing. Over the past three months, anecdotally some publishers tell me they have seen a steady drop off in Facebook referred traffic, some sites by more than 40%, making them wonder if this change had already taken place, while others are worried that a more precipitous drop is coming.
The analytics site Parse.ly noted in December that overall Facebook traffic referrals to publishers were sharply down, to about 26% from 40% over the year, while Google's was growing. Mark Zuckerberg, as many headline writers have noted, is changing his relationship status with publishers to "it's complicated".
Layoffs at "social first" news companies including BuzzFeed, Mashable, Mic and others are the hard evidence that the distributed model for news is simply not working in the way that venture capitalists and entrepreneurs thought it would. At the Tow Center for research into journalism at Columbia University where I work, we have continued to interview newsrooms and monitor publishers on Facebook. While there has been little sign of fewer stories and links being posted to Facebook by publishers, the sentiment towards the social site has soured.
Comment: "Insurance policy", "secret society"... If this is what's in the text messages the Intelligence Committee has, it makes you wonder what's in the text messages that were "lost". These text messages continue to be a boon to anyone wishing to know what actually goes on behind the curtain.
See also: