Expert: Facebook's Instant Articles 'The End Of The Internet As We Know It'
NEW YORK (CBS Sacramento/AP) -- Facebook debuted its "Instant Articles" Wednesday, where nine major media companies – including The New York Times, NBC News and BuzzFeed – can publish content directly to the social media site's news feed.
Users can see the content on their news feeds on Facebook's iPhone app. Instead of linking back to an article, the article itself opens up in Facebook, leaving users on the Facebook page.
"The way it works is if we're out on the street on our smartphone and we're reading through our Facebook news feed, if you see an article you like – if it's one of these special new articles – you click on it," Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine's national affairs editor, explained to "CBS This Morning." "It instantly pops up on your cellphone screen because it lives inside Facebook. There's no more links to click out and then wait for a webpage to load."
Sherman warns that there are major risks for news organizations posting its content within Facebook.
"The risk, the danger is that you are conditioning readers to live inside Facebook and to think that their news exists inside Facebook," Sherman said. "So what reason would there be for a reader to then travel out to read The New York Times' website, its cellphone app or its print newspaper?"
Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer, told The Times that the company wants to gives its users what they want the most.
"We see ourselves as first helping people connect with friends and family," Cox told The Times. "And second, helping people be informed about the world around them."
Sherman believes that news organizations will be pressured to send more free content to Facebook, with its more than 1.4 billion users worldwide.
"I think it's the end of the Internet as we know it," Sherman told "CBS This Morning." "I mean, Facebook wants the entire Internet to live inside its walled garden of Facebook."
Sherman continued: "My friends in the news business, everyone talks about how desperate this play is by media companies in saying how do we reach this massive audience."
The New York Times says its' doing "Instant Articles" on an experimental basis, reporting that Facebook's "Instant Articles" makes some organizations "uneasy."
"But Facebook's role as a powerful distributor of news makes many people in the industry uneasy. The fear is that it could become more of a destination than their own sites for the work they produce, drawing away readers and advertising," The Times reports.
Cox told The Times that they are addressing media companies' concerns.
"We're starting with something that we think is going to work for some publishers for some articles and for some business models," Cox explained. "We're not trying to go, like, suck in and devour everything."
Sherman states that it's a "fair assumption" that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking over the world.
"Everything that we do online Facebook wants to take place within Facebook," Sherman said, "so that you're chatting with your friends, you're seeing pictures. But you're also booking travel, you're reading the news, you're doing everything within Facebook."
