
The Guardian Pulls Out of Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News - r3bl
http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/
======
Symbiote
This discussion has reminded me that I intended to make a donation to the
Guardian, since I read it every day and use an adblocker.

The link for a one-off contribution is here:
[https://contribute.theguardian.com/](https://contribute.theguardian.com/)

Or for a subscription, here:
[https://subscribe.theguardian.com/](https://subscribe.theguardian.com/)

I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on-
time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually
delayed delivery to me by at least a week.

~~~
moonshinefe
they're still better than most big news organizations, but they're massively
scewed toward a certain type of left wing echo chamber at this point. I loved
reading the publication for years; the Snowden revelations were the high
point.

Now you'll get a massive dosage of anti-Sanders, anti-Corbyn hit pieces and
similar along that political vein. You'll get a solid 70% of opinion articles
pushing extreme feminism. If that's your cup of tea, all the power to you. But
I don't think they're remotely impartial for a second anymore.

Comments sections strategically opened or closed or moderated depending on the
subject.

Good on them for pulling out of Facebook I guess, but that definitely doesn't
mean they're remotely objective at this point in my experience.

~~~
djtriptych
Care to recommend any objective news outlets?

~~~
K2L8M11N2
Reuters or AP is the closest you can get to objective news, as they're both
press agencies. (Impartiality and objectivity are key principles of any press
agency.)

~~~
thomasahle
There is still a bias in which things are considered news worthy and how often
they are reported. In principle an objective newspaper can correct for that.

~~~
beaconstudios
this is the problem the BBC falls foul of. Their reporting is reasonably
impartial but they're infamous for excluding reporting on topics that they are
not politically aligned with and over-reporting stories that support certain
narratives.

------
twsted
This is great, we all should support this.

The web is at a crossroad and we should promote multiple platforms, old-style
blogs, decentralized navigation, classic journalism, etc.

For too many people, Facebook is the web and this is really sad and wrong.

We must find other ways to pay for information and curated content, limiting
tracking and defending privacy.

~~~
blazespin
Oh, I dunno. I thought it was an interesting experiment. I think it still has
its uses. Facebook is hardly a monopoly in the sense that google or microsoft
was. I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use
it, it's usually just to connect with friends.

Facebook / instagram / messenger, from what I can see, are just hard charging
innovative platforms trying to create products people like. Their businesses
could crater pretty easily and the only reason it doesn't is because they keep
trying different things.

It's not like search and microsoft's OS dominance / network effects from their
Office products.

You don't need to log onto facebook in order to work, you chose to because
it's fun and you can connect with friends. Google / MSFT have far deeper
hooks.

~~~
onion2k
_I know tonnes of people who don 't use facebook and the people who do use it,
it's usually just to connect with friends._

Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users as of Q4 2016[1]. At that time
approximately 3.4 billion people used the internet. So a little over 1/2 the
internet-using population, and 1/4 of _everyone on Earth_ , has a Facebook
account that they access at least once a month. If you drill down a bit about
80% of American adults use Facebook regularly[2]. You may know tonnes of
people who don't use Facebook, but I think that's actually quite unusual.
Outside of our HN-reading, privacy-interested, technically-competent bubble
the overwhelming majority of people use Facebook, and Facebook does have an
effective monopoly.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-
earnings...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings/)
[2] [http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-
update-20...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/)

~~~
insickness
80% of the country using facebook 'regularly' is not a monopoly. And even if
it were, what are they monopolizing, social media in general? Just because 80%
of the country visits McDonald's regularly does not make them a monopoly.

~~~
danieldk
That is a bad analogy. You can start a family diner tomorrow and compete with
McDonalds. There is nothing preventing that 80% to eat at your place.

However, you cannot start a social network tomorrow and expect to make a
reasonable income. People will not join your network, because their friends
are not there. Facebook holds a significant part of the world population
hostage, because they cannot 'dine' somewhere else. Contrast this with a
situation where social networks are federated. You could opt to go to a
competing network because their service is better, without losing contacts to
your friends.

I would not know if that qualifies as a monopoly legally, but there is clearly
a huge difference between McDonalds and Facebook.

~~~
icebraining
While network effects exist and are worrying, this is a bit too strong - you
can have two accounts concurrently, and many people do. Hence why FB had to
buy Instagram and Whatsapp, and why Snapshat has more than a hundred million
users.

~~~
danielpatrick
"You can have two accounts concurrently"... on all the sites that Facebook
owns.

They tried to buy Snapchat too.

Some interesting reading on how we might measure the unusual cost of
Facebook's monopoly to society.

[https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-
monopo...](https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/)

------
nilkn
Facebook has single-handedly almost ruined news consumption among certain
demographics in the US.

Your news feed is designed from the ground up with powerful artificial
intelligence to become an echo chamber, and lots of FB users just don't
understand this. They fall for it completely.

I have more liberal friends than conservative friends, and my FB feed
literally only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam),
some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias.

I have to go out of my way to seek out opinions from or articles shared by my
conservative friends. Even if I do this frequently, FB still does not
incorporate them into my feed. Instead, every single day, it shows me low-
quality clickbait anti-Trump articles shared by someone who lived on the same
floor as me in a college dorm 7 years ago with whom I shared one conversation
in real-life and whom I've never interacted with on FB in any way aside from
approving her friend request.

~~~
pmyteh
This is something some colleagues in my research team (Reuters Institute for
the Study of Journalism, part of the University of Oxford) are studying.

The evidence doesn't seem to show an effect: while there's definitely partisan
selective exposure as a result of Facebook's algorithm, our longitudinal
audience data suggests that before Facebook people mostly only read or watched
a single news source. So even the attenuated diversity you get through a
selective feed still seems to result in wider incidental exposure than the
pre-social media world.

No paper to link, as the research is still ongoing. I understand they look
like pretty robust results, though - it's certainly changed the way we look at
things.

~~~
Tanegashima
Facebook doesn't show up posts based on the source. They do it at individual
levels.

So even if you read the "Unbiased Times", you can get a biased selection of
articles because of the algorithm.

~~~
pmyteh
Quite true. Analogous things happen in print, though: people often read only
the sections of papers which interest them (and, at the extreme, consciously
skip those op-ed columnists which raise their blood pressure).

~~~
Tanegashima
Exactly, and even if they read, they will reject it and forget it.

However, in the old days, you could get away with fake news, and today, you
can get away with fake news (even break the law, because it's the internet,
and you can write in English and have .com or .us domain in whichever country
you want), and it's even lucrative to do so!

------
ch215
The trade magazine, Press Gazette, recently launched a campaign to 'stop
Google and Facebook destroying journalism'

[http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-
duopoly...](http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly-
campaign-to-stop-google-and-facebook-destroying-journalism/)

~~~
criddell
They don't need Google or Facebook. The news business is doing a great job of
destroying themselves.

~~~
throwaway91111
How do you figure, specifically?

~~~
criddell
Exhibit 1 would probably be the inaction of newspaper publishers 20 years ago
as Craigslist took the classified ad business away.

Exhibit 2 might be the NYT taking on massive debt 10-15 years ago even as it
was pretty clear that their business was changing. Money was cheap and their
magic 8 ball said _outlook good_ , so that was all they needed.

Exhibit 3 is probably the lack of care publishers have around the user
experience on the web. AMP and IA is Google and Facebook saying "your product
is great, your presentation is terrible". A 500 word story should load on a
phone in under a second all the time.

Exhibit 4 would be lowering of the editorial bar by lots of outlets. This is
probably the big one in my opinion:

* the NYT reporting in the run up to the Iraq war still bothers me, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose

* editors know that there aren't always two equal sides to every story, but that's the format they have

* their interview formats seemed designed so that a question with a yes or no answer can be spun on fly into a statement about something unrelated

* when everything is called _breaking news_ , nothing is breaking news

* the patterns of news outlets are so obvious, that they are easy to manipulate (how many hours of television and lines of print were spent on Obama's birth certificate?)

Exhibit 5 is probably the overly conservative approach to the web. A digital
newspaper is the obvious path and it's the only one too many outlets are
exploring. Buzzfeed is a nice exception. I don't even think they expect
readers to go to their website. Buzzfeed packages everything for sharing and
the content flows just about everywhere. I don't think the conservative
behavior of most outlets is due to lack of ideas. Some very smart people (like
Dave Winer and Jonathan Abrams) have expressed a lot of interesting ideas that
nobody seems to be willing to experiment with.

A decent amount of shrinkage in the news business was overdue. If you travel
and read local papers, they are all almost exactly the same. If you watch
local evening news, every program has the same format and basically the same
set. There's a ridiculous amount of duplication and redundancy and getting rid
of that frees up a lot of resources to work on other stuff. Fortunately, I
think the shrinkage is mostly complete.

~~~
throwaway91111
This is great. Thank you.

------
w-ll
How come the Apple News Feed in Siri isn't configurable? It doesn't even
follow the sources of the News.app. It's constantly clickbaity or depressing.
Who moderates and chooses that.

~~~
fiatpandas
Unsubstantiated guess: Apple wouldn't be able to tell big publishers their
active reach on the News platform is X million people if it limited the news
in the widget to the app sources you've explicitly followed.

I was also turned off by this and stopped using it for that reason.

------
OliverJones
Guardian spokesperson: "Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the
trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships
with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-
class journalism.”

Precisely. FB's brand with respect to news is damaged to the point where it's
negative. FB is the place to get fake nuz. The Guardian and the Times are wise
not to allow their content to move under the FB brand.

------
chmars
Ah, Apple News. Americans might want to know that it is still not widely
available in the rest of the world – probably another failed Apple project.

I had some hope that Apple News could help RSS but that was apparently never
Apple's intention.

~~~
IBM
It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. The Guaridan seems to be the anomaly.

>Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added
push notifications as part of a redesign last year and now delivers
significant traffic thanks to the fact that it comes pre-installed on hundreds
of millions of devices.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-
articles-...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-
facebook-future-ads-video)

[2] [http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-
finding-...](http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding-
favor-publishers/)

~~~
yabatopia
> It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2].

That's not the impression I get from reading both articles. Some publishers
like Mic seem to be still in a honeymoon phase with Apple News, but there's a
lot of criticism similar to Instant Articles. "Being committed to" and
"spending a lot of time" doesn't equal to a financial success for publishers.

~~~
IBM
I follow Media Twitter pretty closely. Apple News has become a significant
driver of traffic for a lot of publications. This contrasts to when it
launched when no one thought it would amount to anything.

Here's a few more stories

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-
ne...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-news-is-
emerging-as-a-significant-traffic-driver-for-some-news-orgs/)

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-
broadcast...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcaster-
is-using-apple-news-push-alerts-to-reach-new-younger-audiences/)

[https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-
telegraph/](https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/)

------
kartan
This is one of the problems with monopolies, or maybe the bigger one. Once you
are dominant in one business, search/mobile/messaging, you can take over other
business without much effort.

They are not news companies, they are not in the news business, they don't
know it, and they have not done anything to be worth the trust of the public.
They are just convenient because they are a monopoly in another area.

~~~
gcb0
sadly, you just described news companies.

almost none of them know about news, they just happen to own the largest
distribution media in some region and because of that everyone have to listen
to them.

add to that that traditional media (tv, radio) you are limited by government
allowing you to own a frequency.

~~~
malza
Those large media distributions didn't appear out of nowhere, they were built
by entrepreneurs and communities. They slowly merged into the huge operations
that exist today. That said, those publications have got so big that some have
become divorced from reality... you only have to look as outlets like The
Guardian and the huge losses they continue to absorb. Extreme even by industry
standards.

------
Someone
If a paper becomes a part of a large feed, it risks becoming an
interchangeable part and that means the aggregator can lower prices.

In some sense, Apple faced that problem, too. It created its own sales
channel, whereas the Guardian has one to fall back on.

In contrast, Intel when faced with that problem in the PC market, choose to
work on brand awareness through the "Intel Inside" campaign. Reason likely is
that, to create their own sales channel, they would have had to start making
PCs, thus competing with their own customers.

So, Intel accepted that there were larger entities offering both their and
their competitor's product, as long as it had ample opportunity to market its
brand there.

So, perhaps the aggregators should work on two things: pay more to their
contributors, and allow contributors more to present their brand.

------
Stranger43
The problem with the "semi-auto" curated feeds that all of the Internet
middlemen thinks is going to finally allow them to turn their online market
share into profits is that the feed idea depend on the same omnibus newspaper
model* that no longer works for the newspaper industry.

The dead of the omnibus paper the press is forced to choose between a return
to the old local/partisan model where the paper becomes a part of political
movement and receives "patronage" from that movement in forms of paid
subscriptions, or the yellow(named for the color of cheap paper) model that
lives off scandal creation.

*Most of the newspapers of the 90ies based most of their revenue off content sourced from their network of partners a model that only really worked because the paper had access to long distance communication networks too expensive/exclusive for widespread usage among consumers.

------
rdiddly
"The draw of Instant Articles was that they load much faster than the Facebook
links that take readers back to most publishers’ own sites."

Are you serious, _that_ is the draw? Apologies as needed from me (someone who
doesn't know or care a thing about Facebook) but I'm surprised. Couldn't a
publisher easily silver-bullet this just by _removing the bloatware from their
own site?_

~~~
Neliquat
Agreed. Give me a decent site, not AMP bs.

------
fiatpandas
Always seemed crazy to me that publishers were willing to give up so much for
these integrations. The ability to have final say over how readers experience
your information, and opportunities for freely measuring/analyzing that
experience, should be key for news organizations that want to evolve.

Integrating with FB IA & Apple News is giving up power for gains that may not
be worth it in the long run.

------
sghi
I get why they've done it, and The Guardian is a site that I both contribute
to and disable my ad-blocker for, but I will miss the speed at which the
articles load on my ancient and rubbish phone.

I'd still rather support them though!

------
inian
I find it surprising that they are still going strong on AMP. I tend to club
AMP along with Instant Articles, etc. Any thoughts on as to why this is the
case?

~~~
zigzigzag
I think they're similar in goal but quite different in implementation. AMP
gives publishers a lot more control and apparently that shows up in ad revenue
figures.

------
Operyl
Dunno, as a user I'm a bit sad. I enjoyed having a simple native app to view
all my news in, (Apple News). I was subscribed to The Guardian, but now I
don't feel like I'll get my worth from their network if I have to change my
daily flow just for their news site.

------
nthcolumn
Most writers, be they novelists, journalists, bloggers or whatever label suits
you, wish to write and hope to be paid well enough for it so that they can
write some more. Most will acknowledge that they have a bias from the very
outset (called 'eating'). If you are 'lucky' enough to have some semi-
permanent arrangement with some publisher you will have their biases to
contend with and if your employer accepts monies for advertising you will have
their clients' biases to contend with and if they accept subscriptions you
must contend with the bias of protecting the bubble into which the subscribers
so willingly insert themselves because here in the United Kingdom, newspapers
and even television media have, historically and quite openly, been arranged
along political and socio-economic lines to the degree that if one took the
Guardian one could be fairly assumed to be a 'middle-class, slightly-left of
centre, hand-wringing, grammar school educated' whereas if you took the
Telegraph you were ‘a cunt’. I find it especially relevant today what with all
this talk of what is and isn't 'fake news'. Can 'good' journalism be paid for?
What is 'good' journalism? And what are you paying for? Clearly some people do
not wish to wander from the menu and can be justifiably upset having paid for
a certain serving at having other unpleasantries appear on their plates. When
you pay for your subscription and I do not mean to pick, you might wish to pay
the Dirty Digger instead or as well as even, do you expect 'a' truth or 'the'
truth? If the unbiased reporting of facts is what you are after then doesn't
an aggregated feed from a variety of sources much better fit that goal? I
could write more...

------
frik
Would be great if some newspapers and other media cooperate and found a new
friendly-minded ad-network. Provide old-school picture based banner ads with
pay-per-click or pay-per-view models and no (or very small and fast) JS third
party code/library.

~~~
_eht
This is what the people want. Even those who don't realize it yet.

~~~
jbreckmckye
Unfortunately, it is not what advertisers pay for.

------
mgiannopoulos
The Guardian is trying to get subscribers and donations. I'm not sure how much
Apple and Facebook help them facilitate that goal.

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
I'm pretty sure Apple News supports subscription content, but not a patron-
style subscription.

~~~
mgiannopoulos
Perhaps they didn't like Apple's taking a percentage of such subscriptions
then.

------
luhn
Instant Articles is the best experience I've ever had reading an article
online. It loads lightning fast and doesn't have bloated layouts or obtrusive
advertising. I was shocked the first time I [unknowingly] clicked on an
Instant Article.

I think it's best for the internet's health that Instant Articles is slowly
declining, but it did show me how much better the experience could be if
people paid attention to that stuff.

(I'm only commenting on the bigger picture, nothing about the Guardian
specifically. They actually have one of the better websites out there.)

------
Angostura
Sad to see The Guardian go from Apple News, though I respect their decision:(

~~~
Phlow
As am I. I would pay a subscription fee to keep them on Apple News. That's
where I read most of my news. If they aren't going to give me the option to
pay them to keep using them, I'm not going to pay them, it's that simple.
Pretty silly move in my opinion.

------
throwaway348929
I would love a Netflix/Spotify-style news system where I pay a flat monthly
fee, get articles from dozens or hundreds of providers, and absolutely,
positively no ads. There's no other way I'll ever pay for a subscription to a
single news source, and I'm going to continue to block ads. I agree with
others that even just tracking what I read makes me not want to subscribe. I
just want a news feed, possibly that I can tailor, and with no ads. I'll pay
for it.

------
carlmungz
I think it's way too late for media companies to regain any ground from
platforms like Facebook, Snapchat etc. Their models need such a fundamental
rethink and I'm not sure any of the execs in charge have to the stomach to do
so.

------
davidf18
Thomas Frank ("What's the matter with Kansas, "Listen, Liberal (2016)), is an
American journalist who was kicked off MSNBC and writes for The Guardian
instead and not US MSM.

Not only did US MSM (NYT, WaPo, ...) ignore Frank, they ignored the fact that
Trump and Sanders were better at protecting STEM jobs by combatting H1-B Visa
abuse than Clinton. (See ComputerWorld article below).

[https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-
frank](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank)

He was warning the Democrats not to ignore the affects of globalization on the
working class:

March of _2016_ Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's
why
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-
trump-why-americans-support)

After BrExit (July). The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will
America's wake up?
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/revenge-
against-elites-americas-wake-up)

The first article I started sending to people in early June.

He explains very clearly that the Democrats left drifted away from the
strategy of FDR of supporting the working class and protecting American jobs.
Hilary was for trade which decimated working class and for H1-B visas and
illegal immigration which depressed wages for STEM and working class
respectively.

Trump was anti-trade, anti-illegal immigration, and anti-H1-B abuse (he
complained when Disney of FL replaced 250 American IT workers with H1-B).
Notably, HRC was more like Bush and Rubio wanted to expand H1-B.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-
careers/bern...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it-
careers/bernie-sanders-wants-to-raise-wages-of-h-1b-workers.html)

"Sanders doesn't go into great detail about his work visa proposal, but at
least he brings it up. His main opponent in the campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, doesn't discuss the H-1B visa at all
in her "comprehensive" immigration platform.

Among the leading Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, the
billionaire developer, has emerged as the chief H-1B critic for his party.
Like Sanders, Trump wants prevailing wages increased. Another candidate, Sen.
Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is on the cusp of reversing his previously supportive
position and is working on reform legislation.

Republican candidates who are seen as H-1B supporters and would likely back an
increase in the annual cap on the visas are former Florida governor Jeb Bush
and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Hillary Clinton may be more aligned with Rubio and Bush than she is with
Sanders on the H-1B issue. While serving as a U.S. senator representing New
York, Clinton traveled to Buffalo in 2003 to mark the opening of an office of
IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). That was 12 years ago,
but the H-1B issue was very much a subject of controversy by then. TCS is one
of the largest users of the H-1B visa.

The Clinton links to the IT offshore outsourcing industry have continued since
then through the work of the Clinton Foundation, where Tata has been
participating in its STEM education efforts. In 2011, former President Bill
Clinton was paid $260,000 by IT services provider HCL to deliver a speech."

