What is the plan of FACEBOOK?

Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.

Tech companies have always stepped on one another’s toes to try to become people’s gateway to the digital world — the only place people need to go to get what they want. It’s why Google, a search engine, started a social network and why Facebook, a social network, started a search engine. It’s why Amazon, a shopping site, made a phone and why Apple, a phone maker, got into shopping.

Now, their reach is extending wider, to nontechnology companies like newspapers and magazines. Or, put another way, all kinds of companies are now becoming tech companies.

Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)

Photo

A photo from a National Geographic article about bees that was part of the Facebook experiment. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Everyone involved recognizes that shift is already well underway. The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media. It is similar to what happened to musicians when iTunes started selling individual songs instead of albums.

But news reports, like albums before them, have not been created that way. One of the services that editors bring to readers has been to use their news judgment, considering a huge range of factors, when they decide how articles fit together and where they show up. The news judgment of The New York Times is distinct from that of The New York Post, and for generations readers appreciated that distinction.

“In an analog world, you had to think of a newspaper as a collection of stories,” said Edward Kim, chief executive of SimpleReach, which provides publishers and marketers with online metrics. “That’s how it was packaged and distributed and sold.”

“In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,” Mr. Kim said.

Traditional editors have had no choice but to give up some of their control. But who takes their place? Readers’ friends who recommend articles serve as editors, and so does Facebook’s algorithm.

Facebook executives have insisted that they intend to exert no editorial control because they leave the makeup of the news feed to the algorithm. But an algorithm is not autonomous. It is written by humans and tweaked all the time.

 same way.