The Facebook Phenomenon: Revolutionizing Journalism

With about 1.3 billion users worldwide – or a fifth of the world's population – Facebook is revolutionizing journalism in a way that has never been anticipated before.

And this is being done by just one man -- 26-year-old Facebook engineer Greg Marra -- together with his team of 16 technicians, according to a New York Times report.

Marra says he and his team design the code that powers Facebook's News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see.

He says about once a week, they adjust the complex computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she logs on to Facebook. Marra says the code is based on "thousands and thousands" of metrics, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story a user has received and how long readers spend on an article.

He says their objective is to identify what users most enjoy, noting that their findings vary around the world. For example, in India, people are mostly interested in ABCDs – astrology, Bollywood, cricket and divinity, he says.

If Facebook's algorithm based on artificial intelligence favors a publisher, the rewards, in terms of visitor traffic, can be huge financially.

Figures from the analytics company SimpleReach show that Facebook's News Feed drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of information, the percentage is even higher and continues to increase, SimpleReach says.

No wonder, Facebook has become to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a giant publisher wielding enormous power while providing information access to hundreds of millions of consumers.

According to a study from the Pew Research Center, about 30 percent of adults in the U.S. get their news on Facebook.

Senior editors of the world's leading publications have taken notice of the Facebook phenomenon, and are simply awed.

Cory Haik, senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post, says what Facebook is doing represents "the great unbundling" of journalism.

Haik notes that newspaper publishers are increasingly reaching out to their readers through individual articles rather than complete editions of newspapers or magazines – just as the music industry has moved largely from selling whole albums to particular songs bought instantly online.

Edward Kim, a co-founder of SimpleReach, says a publication's home page will soon be important more as an advertisement of its brand than as a destination for its readers.