Skip to footer

Facebook redesign like a 'personalized newspaper,' Zuckerberg says

The new Facebook News Feed will focus on individual customization and visual cues.

|
Reuters
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gestures while speaking to the audience during a media event at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on March 7, 2013.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Facebook is getting a face-lift.

At a press conference in Menlo Park, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will immediately begin rolling out a redesign of its News Feed, the centerpiece of the Facebook experience. While the current News Feed revolves largely around text, the new News Feed will incorporate more photos, videos, and graphics.

Ideally, Zuckerberg explained, the feed will become a kind of “personalized newspaper,” where users can “drill down into topic-specific news feeds,” as the New York Times put it. For instance, you can set your preferences to filter in only info from in-platform games, such as FarmVille 2; or you can customize the feed in such a way that it displays only photos from friends. 

In addition, you’ll be able to set up multiple feeds, and click back and forth between them.

"The stories around you are intricate and detailed and should be displayed with more than just text," Zuckerberg said, according to Computerworld. "We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a broad quality of content... socially and locally updated from people around you. A front page or top news or most important news going on across all topics. And the ability to drill down into any topic you want."

Facebook has framed the update as a boon for users. But as Nicholas Carlson of Business Insider notes, the whole thing will be a boon for Facebook and its advertisers, too.

“Gadget advertisers will pay a premium to buy ads on the gadget section of The New York Times. Automotive advertisers will pay a premium to buy ads in the 'autos' section of The New York Times. This is called endemic advertising,” Carlson writes. Facebook is now pursuing a similar strategy, he adds. The “sectioning of the news feed should lead to more endemic advertising for Facebook, and increased ad rates.”

More when we know it. In the meantime, here’s a question for you: What do you think the odds of this redesign stirring up the same kind of user wrath as the 2009 overhaul? 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Facebook redesign like a 'personalized newspaper,' Zuckerberg says
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0307/Facebook-redesign-like-a-personalized-newspaper-Zuckerberg-says
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe