Facebook is giving up on news—but it was never actually serious about

Both pieces should have made it clear to any journalists still hazy on this topic: News is off Meta’s friends list, never mind how long publishers had hoped otherwise. 

“The problem isn’t that Facebook is now pivoting away from news,” says Damon Kiesow, a chair in journalism innovation at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “The problem is that too many news organizations have assumed that that free source of referrals was somehow earned or somehow guaranteed.”

But it’s taken almost a decade for the Meta-media relationship to curdle to this point.

Facebook’s first big fling with journalism arguably came in 2011, when the Washington Post debuted its Social Reader as an app on the social network. The Social Reader suggested stories from the Post and other outlets based on such signals as friends’ reading habits.

The concept now evokes Cambridge Analytica, but at first readers jumped on it—months later, the Post bragged that more than 11 million people used Social Reader. Other publishers shipped similar apps, resulting in a sort of news-link pollution on Facebook. 

And then only months later, Facebook tweaked its News Feed layout to stuff these shared links into one smaller module. That sent social-reader traffic collapsing—one of many times newsroom social-media managers got sandbagged by Facebook’s prioritization of overall engagement over journalists’ work. 

By then, though, Facebook had another new thing for journalism: the fast-loading Instant Articles format it had launched in May of 2015. This solved an actual problem, as many news sites still suffered from horribly slow load speeds on mobile browsers.

“Publishers’ mobile pages often . . . weren’t,” says Chris Krewson, executive director of the local-news group LION Publishers. “It was largely a desktop web, and one cluttered with incredibly slow-loading rich-media ad units.”

Cross-publishing to Facebook’s Instant Articles could get complicated, but media outlets faced a bigger problem: The strategy didn’t seem to make them much money, nor bring them much of an audience.That led to publishers like the New York Times and Fox News walking away from the experiment as they improved their own mobile presences.  

After a few years of Instant Articles’ sustained failure to launch, Snapchat and TikTok had become major threats to Meta that required a reallocation of Facebook’s most important screen real estate. So last July, Facebook redesigned the Feed feature to promote Stories and Reels, its responses to those platforms; with news now downranked, Meta said last October that it would shutter Instant Articles.

Yet another Meta initiative promised a more direct boost to publishers in 2019: paying them to reproduce their work in Facebook under a dedicated News Tab. 

Publishers initially liked the News Tab, which gave the company a constructive response to publishers’ gripes that posting links to stories unfairly extracted value from the news business. (To their point, deals that Facebook cut with publishers in Australia let it escape a government-mandated link tax that led the company to briefly ban all sharing of news links there.) 

But in the end, beating TikTok remained the high-order bit at Meta, and the News Tab system wouldn’t help with that. In the U.S., Meta started telling publishers in July 2022 that it would end News Tab payments; it’s now removing the News Tab in Europe too.

In 2021, Facebook introduced yet another feature, this one geared toward independent journalists who might be tempted by Substack. Facebook’s Bulletin newsletter platform launched with upfront payments to selected writers. 

“We’re hoping to make this a sustainable, long-term business for all of our writers,” Facebook strategic partnership manager Samantha Bennet said at a 2021 Online News Association conference.

The Bulletin writers on that panel sounded more cautious. Sophia Qureshi then compared the stipend she got for her metro-Atlanta coverage to a startup’s founding round, saying “My job is to figure out a way to be sustainable after a certain point of time.”

And then, last October, Meta said it would shut down Bulletin in early 2023. (Qureshi moved her newsletter to Substack.) 

Facebook isn’t alone in hyping new platforms for journalism that don’t deliver for publishers. (Meta’s public-relations office did not answer an email seeking comment.) Both Apple and Google have pushed their own streamlined publishing formats that yielded too little publisher revenue but did serve those tech giants’ business motives. 

“That’s the organizational imperative for companies that are entirely profit-driven,” says the University of Missouri’s Kiesow.

Krewson gives Meta some credit for its earlier grants to support journalism (some of which went to LION), saying they “helped hundreds of newsrooms build subscription businesses.”

But that didn’t make Meta’s properties any foundation for a news business.

“It was Facebook’s audience all along,” Krewson says. “We had just been renting it.”