10 ms·

Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

215 points by dolel22 9y ago

bhhaskin 9y ago
I find it fascinating that media companies like news papers have completely tied their success to a 3rd party platform like Facebook. They have essentially given all of the publishing power to Facebook. AMP is another one that comes to mind.
- smt88 9y ago
  They didn't do it willingly. Facebook drew the news readers away from the publishers, and the publishers had to follow the readers.
  - kevin_b_er 9y ago
    Then they're not publishers anymore. Facebook decides what can be seen, and thus facebook is now the publisher.
    - mtberatwork 9y ago
      Facebook isn't the publisher. They aren't producing the content. They are just another distributor...albeit a very large one.
      - backtoyoujim 9y ago
        Distributor is not quite right. If I run a shop that sells magazines, and I order a four magazines to fill some rack space in the shop the distributor does not decide to send you two and black hole the rest of your order. They send you what you ordered. Facebook is not a distributor. They are acting as gatekeepers, too.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  Came here to say the same thing, except with me it's more of a facepalm type of thing. To see a major newspaper allow its business model to depend on an arbitrary, self-interested black box... groveling for views... wasting time analyzing it... complaining about it like a typical user (like a bitch, if you'll forgive me) is frustrating to watch.
  - mtberatwork 9y ago
    I have a strong distaste for FB as much as the next HNer, but you have to go to where the potential customers are and an enormous amount happen to be and stay entirely on FB.
james_pm 9y ago
Wonderful. Journalism is just a game to the Chicago Tribune. "Because if 1 of 3 Facebook posts isn’t going to be surfaced by the algorithm to a significant degree, that would change how we play the game."
- skj 9y ago
  I think we can allow writers some leeway with metaphor.
- ams6110 9y ago
  It's a game to all newspapers. Reporters may be motivated to report news, but newspapers are only motivated to get readers and advertisers.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  You do realize that's just a turn of phrase, right? Even if you want to be uncharitable about that, it's pretty clear the author is talking about Facebook and not Journalism.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Unfortunately, the world we live in requires some money to have professional journalism. Even if these folks were non-profit, they'd still need some money to get by and do the stuff (pay reporters, curate a website, print physical newspapers, and so on). They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.
- james_pm 9y ago
  It;'s pretty clear to me that, yes, while it's a turn of phrase, they are clearly intensely focused on metrics like shares. He talks of "misses" and "strike outs" in other places. It's no wonder that the mainstream has been adopting more and more of the tactics of content farms with clickbait headlines and articles that are more about generating outrage and "shares" than anything else. A "great" article is defined by how many shares it gets. It's no wonder that high quality, long form, real journalism is slowly fading away. It doesn't pay to do any of that when the only money left is chasing FB shares all the way to the bottom.
ivanbakel 9y ago
It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ganfortran 9y ago
  Big business loves censorship, they go straight demands it if not offered, look at the Youtube boycott that is happening right now. They are surely not fan of FOSS or freedom of speech.
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    They love it until it causes them to lose control over distribution or user retention/acquisition. See: "native articles" and how poorly received they were by news publishers.
    - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
      Business likes anything that helps profits, and hates anything that hurts profits. The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.
- jpalomaki 9y ago
  Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many "boring" news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains. Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice. If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves. My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago: http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-free-society/ http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...
jschuur 9y ago
People simply like too many pages that produce too much content. There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention they have to scroll down all the way. So this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. You can already prioritize posts from a page to appear at the top of your feed if you really don't want to miss posts. The real issue is that people underestimate the amount of content they're going to get with a like.
- tdb7893 9y ago
  But people have always liked too many pages so I'm not sure it can explain the recent drop
  - jschuur 9y ago
    True, perhaps what's happening here is that Facebook made a change that genuinely made the experience better for people in terms of relevant content that they see, and page owners are now unhappy how this impacted their stats. I'm also curious if the end of the elections had an impact on newspaper story interactions? Sure, there's no end to stories after Trump was elected and sworn in, but maybe people are just tired of wall to wall politics coverage?
- leejo 9y ago
  This. From the article: > We went from roughly 20 posts per day to 24 posts per day. If you post that many articles to Facebook then I'm simply going to unfollow you. Imagine I have ten sources posting that much, or one hundred sources. You think I'm going to engage with everyone? Heck no. Post one thing a day, two absolute tops. Ideally one thing a week but obviously that's not many sources ideal model. If I really want to follow you I'll add your RSS feed to my reader. Facebook, Instagram, et al, have become one big screaming match and this is only going to get worse until people realise that less is more. If they decide to change their feed algorithm, well, sucks to be you.
  - jschuur 9y ago
    There are Twitter accounts (I'm looking at your Politico) that constantly repost their stories. I swear they're actually automating deleting their tweets and simply tweeting them every hour (disclaimer: I haven't validated this hypothesis). I don't even follow political Twitter accounts anymore, over tactics like this. I keep them all in a (private) list and browser the list when I want to see what's going on in US politics.
strict9 9y ago
FB has always prioritized content which doesn't lead them to see ads elsewhere (like photos instead of links), but maybe it's something else. I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much in local or even national news coverage. He's the guy that fired all the Sun Times photojournalists and mandated reporters use their iPhones instead. The paper has struggled to find its place in trying to be like the NY Times or Washington Post, covering important national issues, but without the same resources. Meanwhile, hyperlocal sites like DNAinfo have filled the niche, which has strong FB engagement because it provides content people are interested in, but the Tribune isn't providing. Instead of blaming a third party which bears no obligation to send traffic, the Tribune would be better served in providing better local news coverage and less in areas which aren't compelling (celebrity gossip) or where it can't compete (national coverage like NYT).
- 60654 9y ago
  Yeah, the Trib has been 'meh' at national news reporting for a while now... But while they used to have good local reporting, now DNAInfo and The Chicagoist are totally eating their lunch. There are content issues for sure, but I suspect their presentation strategy isn't helping either - the Trib reacted to the growth of digital readership by putting up paywalls and obtrusive ads, essentially driving away digital readers... straight to their competitors. PS. But it still has to be weird for a big newspaper that owned its own distribution and sales channels, to now be so dependent on an opaque third party distributor, which is so in control that it doesn't even bother to tell them when it's altering its distribution, and they have to reverse engineer it from traffic patterns...
- padseeker 9y ago
  I work for the Trib, and read it every day. While your comment about Ferro is true, being interested in hanging with celebrities, I have not noticed a change in the content with Ferro in charge. The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe it has a higher national profile since we live in the 3rd largest city in the country but in reality we're very regional. We also own the LA Times which actually does have a higher national profile. But I digress. I'm not going to dispute some of your legitimate gripes. I'm not a fan of celebrity gossip either. I only know a couple of journalists but I suspect they would agree with you. Facebook or other 3rd party does not have any obligation to us. But the simple truth is our print circulation is declining at a rate faster than our digital circulation is rising. All newspapers are dealing with this issue. The NYT and WashPo has done much better with revenue and digital circulation, 2 papers that do an excellent job of covering subjects of substance. However those rises are directly related to Trump. Even we have seen a rise in subscriptions at the CT as well as LA Times due to Trump. And The LA Times does a really great job of the kind of coverage you are looking for. I feel like you are missing the point of the article. More eyeballs hopefully leads to more advertising revenue, which leads to more money for better coverage, or at least pays the salaries of reporters who provide that coverage. If a third party that previously was delivering more eyeballs is declining that is a concern. All the quality coverage in the world will not change that. It's a legitimate concern for us.
kristianc 9y ago
So, Facebook has a vast cache of data on what people do and don't like and respond to in their feed. Facebook also has any number of 'features' in ML language they can slice and dice this data by, from likes and shares through to time spent on article before returning to the main feed. Browsers of the Facebook feed themselves have any number of ways of accessing information, which they did not have before. If I want sports news on teams from Chicago, I'm no longer beholden to Chicago Tribune or even Facebook for that, I can download something like Bleacher Report TeamStream and have a customized feed of what I find interesting and nothing else. It's probably not massively difficult to work out the kind of content that makes people like, share and click at scale on Facebook - humans are humans after all - but it's probably not consistent with the output of the Chicago Tribune (national stories that are covered in greater detail elsewhere and content which is probably only of any real interest to Chicagoans). This is probably even more the case at the moment with so much of the action politically happening at a national level - Trump is a once in a generation kind of news story. It seems they have two options: - Accept that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform and that they will have to pay to narrowcast news to Chicagoans - Accept that Facebook is going to account for an ever-declining share of their traffic. Either way, I'm not sure there is a way forward for online media that doesn't involve a huge rethink about what the product they serve up is. Blaming the algorithm seems incredibly fruitless.
cbr 9y ago
It sounds like FB is taking the posts that are getting low engagement and cutting them off quicker. This makes a lot of sense!
- rtkwe 9y ago
  Hopefully they're taking into account the actual active times of the fans of a page. If your fans are fairly local, which would map a lot of sense for a newspaper, a page could have huge swings in engagement throughout the day on the same content.
  - cbr 9y ago
    If they're smart they have a model of how they expect a post to behave given who they've shown it to, and show posts more/less widely based on whether it's over/underperforming their prediction.
losteverything 9y ago
Can someone please give me perspective? Does the newspaper increase/decrease revenue with better surfacing? If so, how much? Or conversely, if they don't bother tracking this (& spend $ on a human resource ) will there be any appreciable decrease in revenue. Or is this one person asking the world, "hey, have you also seen this?"
- carrier_lost 9y ago
  Newspapers sell ads based on impressions. Similarly, reporters want more readers to see their work. Better Facebook surfacing = more clickthroughs to newspaper content. More clickthroughs = more readers, more ad impressions. More readers also = greater pool of potential conversion to print subscribers, email newsletter signups, etc. Better surfacing also = greater brand awareness. So yes there are both quantifiable revenue benefits + less quantifiable but still important journalism & marketing benefits.
zappo2938 9y ago
I promoted posts on a Facebook page successfully a few times several months ago. Facebook has been surfacing those posts constantly bombarding me with reminders that they were successful and people are liking the posts and page. Everyday, such and such person liked your page. Maybe Facebook is targeting the smaller people by having the algorithm push their posts over larger companies. This might be a good thing. Do you do better with 1000 duck sized advertisers or 1 horse sized advertiser?
marricks 9y ago
When I had Facebook I was passionate about several topics, but I limited my posting to only 1 - 2 times a month. Initially when I started I got some engagement, questions, etc. As the years wore on I gained some friends who cared about those topics too, who liked my posts, shared, etc. Dozens of likes at times. Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out. It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones. I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word. I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.
- VLM 9y ago
  Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience. Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak. Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.
diminish 9y ago
At some point, a Google search or a Facebook timeline will be covered 100% with very smart, personal, native ads next to your organic search result or your mom saying you "Happy Birthday". Because, Quarter after quarter post-IPO management (at Facebook, Google and others) are denting the returns and eating into ROI margins across worldwide industries and services of an endless spectrum by converting free organic "reach" or "impressions" or "time spent" into advertiser ones. At some point GOOG and FB will stabilize at some market capitalization, defined by their ability to maintain a steady revenue stream from advertisers. [-] http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-brands-and-agencies-are-fighting-back-against-facebooks-and-googles-measurement-snafus/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-brands-and-agencies-are-fi...
callinyouin 9y ago
This is just a thought, but perhaps this is due to an internal effort at FB to filter out "fake news". The changes in their algorithm might be showing some unintended consequences, or maybe the stories from the Tribune that are getting killed really are of dubious quality (I'm not a reader, so I really don't know). The timing of the Tribune's downward trend in post reach would seem to fit this narrative at any rate.
- gdulli 9y ago
  Fake news is about determining bad sources, not individual articles. It's about finding propaganda sites that are intentionally and maliciously inventing false stories. A fake news algorithm wouldn't apply to a credible, established newspaper.
  - callinyouin 9y ago
    If that's the case (and I don't doubt it is, I really don't know how this filtering is supposed to work), isn't that sort of missing the point? The way I understand it, plenty of "credible, established" media outlets are on the hook for propagating unverified, "fake" news. Filtering out the obvious conspiracy theory and propaganda news outlets seems like some really low hanging fruit.
douche 9y ago
I miss the days when Facebook (and Twitter) just had a chronological timeline. At this point, I only see posts from my actual friends if I've set up notifications for their new posts. If this curation is supposed to make me stay on Facebook more, I don't think it's working, because the same post will stay at the top of the feed for six or eight hours, which makes me less likely to check it.
toddmorey 9y ago
Facebook's model of popularity and personal relevance to the top will never be the right platform for news. It alarms me that it's the #1 news source for like 70% of adults in the US. More alarming is how this trend is matched with the move away from hard news towards 'pundit celebrity' commentary by almost all networks. I think there's something in the human psyche where the best feelings come from confirmation of your own biases. This hack wasn't useful when only a few network news programs had to appeal to mass audiences, but it's provided really useful as media has splintered and become personalized. I have this weird personal exercise where I pull up 5 different news tabs all at once. It's AMAZING how different the world looks from different websites, all coving the same events from drastically different perspectives. There has always been slant, but it's become 10x worse in the last decade.
frik 9y ago
> Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts Of course. That's the whole premise of the FB Newsfeed. It started in late 2011 - up to that point the news stream was in chronological order and you saw all posts (depending on your geographic the feature was enabled maybe on a different date). Then the newsfeed showed what FB algorithms provided you depending on your click-, browsing-, friend- and like-history. It's called a filter-bubble, you suddenly see just mote of the same, no variation. It marked the tipping point of FB as social network tool (at least for me).
davidf18 9y ago
I wish FB let you select certain categories. For example, only postings from Friends. Or only postings from other feeds that I follow. There is all of this garbage that I don't want, so as a result I rarely look. Twitter use Tweetbot seems to work a lot better in this regard as I can follow those groups I wish to follow without the junk.
artana 9y ago
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alagappanr 9y ago
Even with over 1000 friends on Facebook - the maximum engagement that my posts reach is probably in the range of 10 to 200 or at the max 300. One thing I have noticed is that the friends with whom you engage the most - chat, like, comments - in turn get to see your posts often and engage with them. Anyone with whom you have not interacted in a long time - more than a few months - will never see any of your posts. I don't see any point of being Facebook friends with anyone with whom I haven't interacted in a while. You aren't getting their updates and they aren't getting yours. Facebook is a social network which I mostly see as a place to broadcast life events to all my broader friend networks and acquaintances. For close friends and family I always prefer medium of communications that are more intimate in nature - phone calls, video calls.
dbrian82 9y ago
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215 points by dolel22 9y ago

I find it fascinating that media companies like news papers have completely tied their success to a 3rd party platform like Facebook. They have essentially given all of the publishing power to Facebook. AMP is another one that comes to mind.

smt88 9y ago
They didn't do it willingly. Facebook drew the news readers away from the publishers, and the publishers had to follow the readers.
- kevin_b_er 9y ago
  Then they're not publishers anymore. Facebook decides what can be seen, and thus facebook is now the publisher.
  - mtberatwork 9y ago
    Facebook isn't the publisher. They aren't producing the content. They are just another distributor...albeit a very large one.
    - backtoyoujim 9y ago
      Distributor is not quite right. If I run a shop that sells magazines, and I order a four magazines to fill some rack space in the shop the distributor does not decide to send you two and black hole the rest of your order. They send you what you ordered. Facebook is not a distributor. They are acting as gatekeepers, too.
rdiddly 9y ago
Came here to say the same thing, except with me it's more of a facepalm type of thing. To see a major newspaper allow its business model to depend on an arbitrary, self-interested black box... groveling for views... wasting time analyzing it... complaining about it like a typical user (like a bitch, if you'll forgive me) is frustrating to watch.
- mtberatwork 9y ago
  I have a strong distaste for FB as much as the next HNer, but you have to go to where the potential customers are and an enormous amount happen to be and stay entirely on FB.

james_pm 9y ago

Wonderful. Journalism is just a game to the Chicago Tribune. "Because if 1 of 3 Facebook posts isn’t going to be surfaced by the algorithm to a significant degree, that would change how we play the game."

skj 9y ago
I think we can allow writers some leeway with metaphor.
ams6110 9y ago
It's a game to all newspapers. Reporters may be motivated to report news, but newspapers are only motivated to get readers and advertisers.
Ensorceled 9y ago
You do realize that's just a turn of phrase, right? Even if you want to be uncharitable about that, it's pretty clear the author is talking about Facebook and not Journalism.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
Unfortunately, the world we live in requires some money to have professional journalism. Even if these folks were non-profit, they'd still need some money to get by and do the stuff (pay reporters, curate a website, print physical newspapers, and so on). They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.
james_pm 9y ago
It;'s pretty clear to me that, yes, while it's a turn of phrase, they are clearly intensely focused on metrics like shares. He talks of "misses" and "strike outs" in other places. It's no wonder that the mainstream has been adopting more and more of the tactics of content farms with clickbait headlines and articles that are more about generating outrage and "shares" than anything else. A "great" article is defined by how many shares it gets. It's no wonder that high quality, long form, real journalism is slowly fading away. It doesn't pay to do any of that when the only money left is chasing FB shares all the way to the bottom.

ivanbakel 9y ago

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ganfortran 9y ago
Big business loves censorship, they go straight demands it if not offered, look at the Youtube boycott that is happening right now. They are surely not fan of FOSS or freedom of speech.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  They love it until it causes them to lose control over distribution or user retention/acquisition. See: "native articles" and how poorly received they were by news publishers.
  - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    Business likes anything that helps profits, and hates anything that hurts profits. The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.
jpalomaki 9y ago
Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many "boring" news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains. Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice. If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves. My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago: http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-free-society/ http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...

jschuur 9y ago

People simply like too many pages that produce too much content. There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention they have to scroll down all the way. So this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. You can already prioritize posts from a page to appear at the top of your feed if you really don't want to miss posts. The real issue is that people underestimate the amount of content they're going to get with a like.

tdb7893 9y ago
But people have always liked too many pages so I'm not sure it can explain the recent drop
- jschuur 9y ago
  True, perhaps what's happening here is that Facebook made a change that genuinely made the experience better for people in terms of relevant content that they see, and page owners are now unhappy how this impacted their stats. I'm also curious if the end of the elections had an impact on newspaper story interactions? Sure, there's no end to stories after Trump was elected and sworn in, but maybe people are just tired of wall to wall politics coverage?
leejo 9y ago
This. From the article: > We went from roughly 20 posts per day to 24 posts per day. If you post that many articles to Facebook then I'm simply going to unfollow you. Imagine I have ten sources posting that much, or one hundred sources. You think I'm going to engage with everyone? Heck no. Post one thing a day, two absolute tops. Ideally one thing a week but obviously that's not many sources ideal model. If I really want to follow you I'll add your RSS feed to my reader. Facebook, Instagram, et al, have become one big screaming match and this is only going to get worse until people realise that less is more. If they decide to change their feed algorithm, well, sucks to be you.
- jschuur 9y ago
  There are Twitter accounts (I'm looking at your Politico) that constantly repost their stories. I swear they're actually automating deleting their tweets and simply tweeting them every hour (disclaimer: I haven't validated this hypothesis). I don't even follow political Twitter accounts anymore, over tactics like this. I keep them all in a (private) list and browser the list when I want to see what's going on in US politics.

strict9 9y ago

FB has always prioritized content which doesn't lead them to see ads elsewhere (like photos instead of links), but maybe it's something else. I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much in local or even national news coverage. He's the guy that fired all the Sun Times photojournalists and mandated reporters use their iPhones instead. The paper has struggled to find its place in trying to be like the NY Times or Washington Post, covering important national issues, but without the same resources. Meanwhile, hyperlocal sites like DNAinfo have filled the niche, which has strong FB engagement because it provides content people are interested in, but the Tribune isn't providing. Instead of blaming a third party which bears no obligation to send traffic, the Tribune would be better served in providing better local news coverage and less in areas which aren't compelling (celebrity gossip) or where it can't compete (national coverage like NYT).

60654 9y ago
Yeah, the Trib has been 'meh' at national news reporting for a while now... But while they used to have good local reporting, now DNAInfo and The Chicagoist are totally eating their lunch. There are content issues for sure, but I suspect their presentation strategy isn't helping either - the Trib reacted to the growth of digital readership by putting up paywalls and obtrusive ads, essentially driving away digital readers... straight to their competitors. PS. But it still has to be weird for a big newspaper that owned its own distribution and sales channels, to now be so dependent on an opaque third party distributor, which is so in control that it doesn't even bother to tell them when it's altering its distribution, and they have to reverse engineer it from traffic patterns...
padseeker 9y ago
I work for the Trib, and read it every day. While your comment about Ferro is true, being interested in hanging with celebrities, I have not noticed a change in the content with Ferro in charge. The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe it has a higher national profile since we live in the 3rd largest city in the country but in reality we're very regional. We also own the LA Times which actually does have a higher national profile. But I digress. I'm not going to dispute some of your legitimate gripes. I'm not a fan of celebrity gossip either. I only know a couple of journalists but I suspect they would agree with you. Facebook or other 3rd party does not have any obligation to us. But the simple truth is our print circulation is declining at a rate faster than our digital circulation is rising. All newspapers are dealing with this issue. The NYT and WashPo has done much better with revenue and digital circulation, 2 papers that do an excellent job of covering subjects of substance. However those rises are directly related to Trump. Even we have seen a rise in subscriptions at the CT as well as LA Times due to Trump. And The LA Times does a really great job of the kind of coverage you are looking for. I feel like you are missing the point of the article. More eyeballs hopefully leads to more advertising revenue, which leads to more money for better coverage, or at least pays the salaries of reporters who provide that coverage. If a third party that previously was delivering more eyeballs is declining that is a concern. All the quality coverage in the world will not change that. It's a legitimate concern for us.

kristianc 9y ago

So, Facebook has a vast cache of data on what people do and don't like and respond to in their feed. Facebook also has any number of 'features' in ML language they can slice and dice this data by, from likes and shares through to time spent on article before returning to the main feed. Browsers of the Facebook feed themselves have any number of ways of accessing information, which they did not have before. If I want sports news on teams from Chicago, I'm no longer beholden to Chicago Tribune or even Facebook for that, I can download something like Bleacher Report TeamStream and have a customized feed of what I find interesting and nothing else. It's probably not massively difficult to work out the kind of content that makes people like, share and click at scale on Facebook - humans are humans after all - but it's probably not consistent with the output of the Chicago Tribune (national stories that are covered in greater detail elsewhere and content which is probably only of any real interest to Chicagoans). This is probably even more the case at the moment with so much of the action politically happening at a national level - Trump is a once in a generation kind of news story. It seems they have two options: - Accept that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform and that they will have to pay to narrowcast news to Chicagoans - Accept that Facebook is going to account for an ever-declining share of their traffic. Either way, I'm not sure there is a way forward for online media that doesn't involve a huge rethink about what the product they serve up is. Blaming the algorithm seems incredibly fruitless.

cbr 9y ago

It sounds like FB is taking the posts that are getting low engagement and cutting them off quicker. This makes a lot of sense!

rtkwe 9y ago
Hopefully they're taking into account the actual active times of the fans of a page. If your fans are fairly local, which would map a lot of sense for a newspaper, a page could have huge swings in engagement throughout the day on the same content.
- cbr 9y ago
  If they're smart they have a model of how they expect a post to behave given who they've shown it to, and show posts more/less widely based on whether it's over/underperforming their prediction.

losteverything 9y ago

Can someone please give me perspective? Does the newspaper increase/decrease revenue with better surfacing? If so, how much? Or conversely, if they don't bother tracking this (& spend $ on a human resource ) will there be any appreciable decrease in revenue. Or is this one person asking the world, "hey, have you also seen this?"

carrier_lost 9y ago
Newspapers sell ads based on impressions. Similarly, reporters want more readers to see their work. Better Facebook surfacing = more clickthroughs to newspaper content. More clickthroughs = more readers, more ad impressions. More readers also = greater pool of potential conversion to print subscribers, email newsletter signups, etc. Better surfacing also = greater brand awareness. So yes there are both quantifiable revenue benefits + less quantifiable but still important journalism & marketing benefits.

zappo2938 9y ago

I promoted posts on a Facebook page successfully a few times several months ago. Facebook has been surfacing those posts constantly bombarding me with reminders that they were successful and people are liking the posts and page. Everyday, such and such person liked your page. Maybe Facebook is targeting the smaller people by having the algorithm push their posts over larger companies. This might be a good thing. Do you do better with 1000 duck sized advertisers or 1 horse sized advertiser?

marricks 9y ago

When I had Facebook I was passionate about several topics, but I limited my posting to only 1 - 2 times a month. Initially when I started I got some engagement, questions, etc. As the years wore on I gained some friends who cared about those topics too, who liked my posts, shared, etc. Dozens of likes at times. Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out. It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones. I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word. I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.

VLM 9y ago
Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience. Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak. Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.

diminish 9y ago

At some point, a Google search or a Facebook timeline will be covered 100% with very smart, personal, native ads next to your organic search result or your mom saying you "Happy Birthday". Because, Quarter after quarter post-IPO management (at Facebook, Google and others) are denting the returns and eating into ROI margins across worldwide industries and services of an endless spectrum by converting free organic "reach" or "impressions" or "time spent" into advertiser ones. At some point GOOG and FB will stabilize at some market capitalization, defined by their ability to maintain a steady revenue stream from advertisers. [-] http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-brands-and-agencies-are-fighting-back-against-facebooks-and-googles-measurement-snafus/ http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-brands-and-agencies-are-fi...

callinyouin 9y ago

This is just a thought, but perhaps this is due to an internal effort at FB to filter out "fake news". The changes in their algorithm might be showing some unintended consequences, or maybe the stories from the Tribune that are getting killed really are of dubious quality (I'm not a reader, so I really don't know). The timing of the Tribune's downward trend in post reach would seem to fit this narrative at any rate.

gdulli 9y ago
Fake news is about determining bad sources, not individual articles. It's about finding propaganda sites that are intentionally and maliciously inventing false stories. A fake news algorithm wouldn't apply to a credible, established newspaper.
- callinyouin 9y ago
  If that's the case (and I don't doubt it is, I really don't know how this filtering is supposed to work), isn't that sort of missing the point? The way I understand it, plenty of "credible, established" media outlets are on the hook for propagating unverified, "fake" news. Filtering out the obvious conspiracy theory and propaganda news outlets seems like some really low hanging fruit.

douche 9y ago

I miss the days when Facebook (and Twitter) just had a chronological timeline. At this point, I only see posts from my actual friends if I've set up notifications for their new posts. If this curation is supposed to make me stay on Facebook more, I don't think it's working, because the same post will stay at the top of the feed for six or eight hours, which makes me less likely to check it.

toddmorey 9y ago

Facebook's model of popularity and personal relevance to the top will never be the right platform for news. It alarms me that it's the #1 news source for like 70% of adults in the US. More alarming is how this trend is matched with the move away from hard news towards 'pundit celebrity' commentary by almost all networks. I think there's something in the human psyche where the best feelings come from confirmation of your own biases. This hack wasn't useful when only a few network news programs had to appeal to mass audiences, but it's provided really useful as media has splintered and become personalized. I have this weird personal exercise where I pull up 5 different news tabs all at once. It's AMAZING how different the world looks from different websites, all coving the same events from drastically different perspectives. There has always been slant, but it's become 10x worse in the last decade.

frik 9y ago

> Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts Of course. That's the whole premise of the FB Newsfeed. It started in late 2011 - up to that point the news stream was in chronological order and you saw all posts (depending on your geographic the feature was enabled maybe on a different date). Then the newsfeed showed what FB algorithms provided you depending on your click-, browsing-, friend- and like-history. It's called a filter-bubble, you suddenly see just mote of the same, no variation. It marked the tipping point of FB as social network tool (at least for me).

davidf18 9y ago

I wish FB let you select certain categories. For example, only postings from Friends. Or only postings from other feeds that I follow. There is all of this garbage that I don't want, so as a result I rarely look. Twitter use Tweetbot seems to work a lot better in this regard as I can follow those groups I wish to follow without the junk.

artana 9y ago

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alagappanr 9y ago

Even with over 1000 friends on Facebook - the maximum engagement that my posts reach is probably in the range of 10 to 200 or at the max 300. One thing I have noticed is that the friends with whom you engage the most - chat, like, comments - in turn get to see your posts often and engage with them. Anyone with whom you have not interacted in a long time - more than a few months - will never see any of your posts. I don't see any point of being Facebook friends with anyone with whom I haven't interacted in a while. You aren't getting their updates and they aren't getting yours. Facebook is a social network which I mostly see as a place to broadcast life events to all my broader friend networks and acquaintances. For close friends and family I always prefer medium of communications that are more intimate in nature - phone calls, video calls.

dbrian82 9y ago

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