{"id":115719,"date":"2015-05-13T07:14:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T07:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=115719"},"modified":"2015-05-13T07:14:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T07:14:05","slug":"facebook-tightens-its-grip-on-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2015\/05\/facebook-tightens-its-grip-on-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook tightens its grip on news"},"content":{"rendered":"
Where do you get your online news? For millions, the answer is Facebook, and now the social media giant is moving to make it even easier to access news articles.<\/p>\n
It’s introducing something called Instant Articles, which will offer news organisations the chance to create interactive content that is much simpler and faster to read on Facebook via a mobile device.<\/p>\n
For news firms desperate to get their content in front of young audiences, that is attractive – but they will also be wary of handing even more power to the social network.<\/p>\n
National Geographic, the New York Times, Buzzfeed, the Guardian and the BBC are among the organisations which will now try out a system which means their articles will be hosted on Facebook’s servers. That means Instant Articles will appear, well, instantly rather than the user having to wait as they follow a link.<\/p>\n
“We think the most important thing here is speed,” Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox told me over a video link to his Menlo Park office. “The obvious lesson we keep on learning is that on a mobile phone, the most important thing is immediacy.” Facebook says it can take as long as eight seconds for a news article to load on a phone under the existing system.<\/p>\n
In a demo of Instant Articles, I was shown a National Geographic piece that filled the screen at once, and had a number of extras – photos you could “like” individually, embedded videos that autoplayed, pop-out charts and maps. Facebook says it is providing publishers with the tools to make their content more engaging.<\/p>\n
Some will be using those tools to make tailored content for Instant Articles, others, including the BBC, which will soon start using the service with its Newsbeat material, will decline that option. They will not want to put on Facebook’s servers anything that is not available on their own sites.<\/p>\n