Facebook’s News Feed, a homepage built by our friends and organized by our clicks and likes, isn’t really a “news” feed. It’s an entertainment portal for stories that remind us of our lives and offer something like an emotional popper. In fact, news readers self-identify as a minority on Facebook: Fewer than half ever read “news” on the site, according to a 2013 Pew study, and just 10 percent of them go to Facebook to get the news on purpose, as opposed to, say, being assaulted by a breaking news event when you’re just scanning baby photos.
Read the full piece at The Atlantic
This points to a fundamental trend affecting the future of news media that the very definition of what society at large considers “news” is changing from what it has been over past generations, as is what contribution society expects of those it calls journalists.
