You Can Now Read the News Directly on Facebook If That Sounds Good to You
Facebook, not content to dominate baby photos and your uncle’s endorsements of Rand Paul, is getting into the journalism business.
Mark Zuckerberg’s crazy social fantasy is launching a feature today that will let news outlets publish their articles directly onto the site. When you see certain news link on Facebook from now on, clicking or tapping them won’t launch you outwards to an Internet browser; it will take you to another part of Facebook, where the news article will live and breathe and be destroyed by commenters.
The tool lets publishers create articles and sell advertisements on those articles and then publish those articles, all for Facebook’s mobile version.
The National Geographic, on Facebook. (Photo credit: Facebook. Eventually this article will one day live on Facebook, too.)
You can read the first batch of articles here, if this is an idea that appeals to you. Keep in mind that you have to be on your smartphone for this to work, and that that smartphone must be an iPhone; otherwise, you’ll be brought to the boring old actual website of the article’s publisher. (Presumably this will eventually also work on Android phones.)
The new feature is called Instant Articles –– calling to mind the delicious and nutritious Ramen noodle soup –– and will “make the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles,” according to Facebook. Apparently, a mobile website takes an average of eight seconds to load, and Facebook wants to decrease that, because who has 8 seconds to sit around and wait for journalism to happen?
The first nine partners are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
READ MORE: Should News Sites Make a Faustian Bargain with Facebook?
