The shift in strategy comes, not coincidentally, after a year in which Facebook came under governmental scrutiny for its role in spreading misinformation and hate speech. Mr. Zuckerberg gave his interview to The Times as his company was preparing for a Jan. 17 hearing, the second Capitol Hill inquiry into the online spread of extremist propaganda. During hearings last fall, Facebook told Congress that agents working for a Kremlin-linked company had disseminated content that reached an estimated 126 million users in the United States in 2016.

As a result of Facebook’s attempt to distance itself from an overheated news cycle and make a return to its friends-and-family roots, publishers who depended on it for traffic are likely to find themselves in trouble.

News outlets that have built a strong bond with readers and viewers through other means will be watching closely, to see whether the size of their audiences — and corresponding advertising dollars — will shrink in the coming months.

“Changing the terms rapidly is really bringing into focus just how powerful the platforms have become and how the infrastructure is a very difficult place for publishers to operate and navigate,” John Ridding, the chief executive of The Financial Times, said. “That has big implications for how people receive news, where they find it and what the quality of their news is.”

Facebook executives held off-the-record meetings with publications like The Wall Street Journal at the end of last year and spoke of renewing the focus on one-to-one communication among people who know one another over content distributed by publishers, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions but not authorized to speak publicly. Even after the heads-up, however, the specifics announced this week came as a surprise, the person said.



Jonah Peretti, the chief executive of BuzzFeed, highlighted the tensions between media organizations and the internet giants Facebook and Google in December, when he publicly criticized the mega-platforms that have fueled the site’s success.