Friends and Headlines

Curating your News Feed

Facebook doesn’t seem to be actively choosing specific stories as much as it is organizing stories with high engagement from its favorite publishers — but that’s okay. Most of the time, I’m just looking for something to read. Still, I did find myself flipping through story after story from the same publications over and over: TIME, CNN, and The New York Times seem to have received favorable placement in the odds pool. The company emphasizes, however, that it will pull stories from all over the Facebook network, and not just from the 40 publishers it chose to create cards for on launch day. Facebook recently made moves to highlight popular posts inside a new "Trending" section, but never before has the company elevated external content to quite so high a pedestal. With a quick tap and drag, you can arrange it so that Headlines shows up first, and you can push your Facebook feed all the way to the back of your news stack.

never before has the company elevated external content to such a high pedestal

The ability to effectively demote your friends below Facebook’s editorially curated content heralds a sea change for the company. Facebook’s stellar new Messenger app contains hardly any Facebook branding, but Paper allows you to experience a world built by Facebook engineers that doesn’t have Facebook’s core product in it. Facebook seems to have shrugged off its dot-com-era identity, where every product it launches has to be focused on increasing Facebook activity amongst your friends. Perhaps Facebook realized that it’s bigger than your group of friends, and that supplying valuable content and curation is another avenue that both businesses and users could love. With Paper the company has aimed narrowly at utility — even if that doesn’t include your Facebook friends.

Facebook has realized it's bigger than your list of friends

Most story cards you’ll find therein have been created by Facebook with custom fonts, colors, and designs to better match 40-some publications the company hand-picked for launch day. National Geographic cards, for example, feature bright yellow borders to match the magazine's design. Paper lets publishers’ content live and breathe, in its ordinary attire, on another website. Each card has a consistent look: a profile photo up top, followed by text, and then a card representing any linked article. Facebook’s goal, as Matas tells it, is to "put content first," a philosophy that has consumed Valley tech culture — like Medium, Paper makes liberal use of white space to draw your eye towards photos or text, and like Flipboard, images are often full-bleed, taking over your entire screen. If you swipe up on a card, a web view of the linked article folds open, Flipboard-style.

When you're finished reading, you can pull down on an article to close it like an envelope. You can like stories, comment on them, share them, and even save them to read later using Pocket, Instapaper, Safari's Reading List, and Pinboard — more proof that Facebook takes Paper seriously as a news-reading app. With the addition of news sections and the absence of ads, Paper becomes even more appealing. (Facebook, of course, won't deny that Paper may someday have ads, but for now I'm thankful.) Apps like Circa and Flipboard are better than Paper at curating top news, since that’s their expertise, but I came away impressed by Paper’s editorial selections, and the hand crafted story cards designed for each publication.