On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted an informal, one-hour Townhall Q&A online to get input from the online community. The session lasted nearly 90 minutes and included questions from a wide array of sources, including Stephen Hawking, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arianna Huffington, on everything from the future of news, the requirement of real names, and getting a job at Facebook. And, of course, there were completely irrelevant questions and spam along the way.For the purpose of this post, we’ll confine our discussion to news. During the Q&A, Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, speaker and consultant, asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s role is in the news. Here is a snippet from that conversation:
Zuckerberg went on to say that fixing the speed issue is not a problem, and was the impetus for Facebook’s new Instant Articles publishing platform which is being tested with a handful of publishers. Publishers like the New York Times and The Guardian can upload their articles directly to Facebook, which seems to benefit everyone involved. Publishers get access to a bigger audience and can earn ad revenue from using the new platform, news consumers get mobile-friendly articles that load 10 times faster and are easier to share, and Facebook gets to keep people from leaving its site.The Facebook CEO is quick to point out that Instant Articles is not strictly Facebook-centric. It is a partnership between publishers and Facebook, so the answer to Jarvis’ question “what’s next?” is completing the rollout of Instant Articles and getting more publishers to embrace it.Arianna Huffington, the mastermind behind The Huffington Post, asked Zuckerberg how he expects online stories to evolve over the next few years. His answer: rich content. As technology evolves, Zuckerberg expects content to move beyond text and photos to include more videos and a more interactive experience. Under the current news delivery model, improvement is needed.”There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces. This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet,” Zuckerberg said.Insider Take:Jarvis and Huffington both compliment Zuckerberg for Facebook’s innovation and contribution to publishing platforms for news, and we’ve got to agree that Facebook has changed how we consume and share news. With 1.44 billion active monthly users, Facebook has more eyeballs than virtually every other platform or site. Zuckerberg uses Facebook’s popularity to leverage his company’s impact on news consumption, much like Google has done with its new array of journalism tools.This cold hard fact will also make it hard for media companies to pass up the opportunity to publish select stories using Instant Articles. So far, media outlets who have been invited by Facebook to participate have been slow to adopt the platform. Once publishers embrace the necessity of strong partnerships with companies like Facebook, we expect more stories to be posted using Instant Articles.As we noted in a previous post, for publishers to use the Facebook tool successfully, they need to be clear what types of content their Facebook audience wants. Do folks who read Facebook on a mobile app really want in-depth, long-form journalism, or would they prefer shorter stories that are interactive and easy to share?
Hopefully, publishers are taking the time to test the Instant Articles platform and compare it to the other platforms they use (e.g., own website, news app, etc.) to see what content works where before they give the Facebook partnership a hearty thumbs up.
