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Re:Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism by wccrawford on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @12:36PM (#16978693)
>Couldn’t Facebook pay publishers directly by licensing their stories or programming? “Yeah,” Zuckerberg said, “I’m not sure that makes sense.”

How in the world would having Facebook pick which publishers to pay end up with better news? They've going to pay the ones that people already want to see and show it to those same people. But now those publishers are further incentivized to cater to that crowd, if that's even possible.

There's no way that Facebook ends up being an actual source of truth for news.

People want to point to FB and say "Hey, they're spreading the wrong news!" But it's other people who are actually pushing the buttons to spread that news, not Facebook.

Re:Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism by deelowe on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @01:18PM (#16979088)
> How in the world would having Facebook pick which publishers to pay end up with better news?

It wouldn't. It's just the solution that most closely models their historical distribution models which their entire business is built around (and has been for so long, they know no other way to do it).