Facebook wants to take over the news business, said Ravi Somaiya at The New York Times. The social network, with 1.4 billion global users, has “already become a vital source of traffic” for news organizations struggling to make money in the internet age. But Facebook now wants to be more than a middleman. It has been quietly negotiating with several media companies — including BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and The New York Times — about hosting news content “inside” Facebook, so that users wouldn’t have to tap often slow-loading links to read or watch an outlet’s content. You might ask why news organizations would go along with such a “Faustian bargain,” said Will Oremus at Slate. Well, they’d “be foolish not to.”
News is just the beginning, said Kevin Kelleher at Time. At its developer conference last week, Facebook unveiled several other offerings that suggest its ambitions for web domination go far beyond the media business.
