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How publishers are using Facebook’s instant articles

On Wednesday, nine major publishers began publishing articles straight to Facebook under the social network’s long-anticipated product, called Instant Articles. Facebook sweetened the deal by letting publishers control the ad sales, branding and content; sell ads on the articles and keep all the revenue; and get data on their readers.

Still, publishers were mixed in their embrace: BuzzFeed and NBC News were the only ones to go all in committing to using the product. Others, like The New York Times and the Atlantic, are taking a more cautious approach. There are still plenty of unknowns, chiefly whether Facebook’s terms will remain as generous to publishers as they seem to be now.

The New York Times–Facebook Deal Is Here

Wednesday morning, in what marks a tectonic shift in the publishing industry, the New York Times is expected to officially begin a long-awaited partnership with Facebook to publish articles directly to the social media giant, a source with direct knowledge of the talks told me. According to people familiar with the negotiations, the Times will begin publishing select articles directly into Facebook’s news feed. BuzzFeed, NBC News, and NatGeo are said to be also joining the rollout, among others.

Facebook’s Extremes

On the far left and the far right, users of the social network are stuck in echo chambers of their own making.

Does Facebook filter our political discourse? Last week, the company released a study of user profiles that purported to show that the social network’s News Feed algorithm doesn’t limit our access to diverse and opposing political points of view. Rather, it said, the narrowness of our Facebook conversations is a result of how we naturally behave. Facebook didn’t create the so-called filter bubble, the authors claimed; it merely reflects it.

How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism

Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy.

Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.

Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.

The Daily Me

Some of the obituaries these days aren’t in the newspapers but are for the newspapers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest to pass away, save for a remnant that will exist only in cyberspace, and the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.