脸书是如何改变用户消费媒体新闻的

Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy.

许多读过这篇文章的人都会被改变，因为26岁的脸书工程师格雷格马拉统计这会是人们非常享受的事。

Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.

马拉先生的团队负责设计编码脸书动态信息-新消息、照片、视频以及用户们看的故事。他也很快晋升为新闻业最有影响力的人之一。

Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.

脸书每个月至少有近世界五分之一的人口-大约13亿人-登录。触手可及公司的数据员提供的数据表明脸书使人们对新闻网站的使用增加了20%。该公司还指出移动设备作为读者增长最快的平台增长比例更大，并且还在持续增长中。

The social media company is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a behemoth that provides access to hundreds of millions of consumers and wields enormous power. About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed.

这家社交媒体公司在新闻界的地位逐渐可与亚马逊在图书出版业的地位媲美。它消费人数上亿，拥有巨大影响力。皮尤研究中心指出30%的美国成年人通过脸书读取新闻。简单的说就是一个新闻网站的命运与否取决于其在脸书动态信息上的表现。

Though other services, like Twitter and Google News, can also exert a large influence, Facebook is at the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism. Most readers now come to it not through the print editions of newspapers and magazines or their home pages online, but through social media and search engines driven by an algorithm, a mathematical formula that predicts what users might want to read.

尽管推特和谷歌新闻等其他服务商也拥有巨大影响力。脸书却是彻底改变人们消费新闻方式的领军人物。如今大多数读者都不再通过纸质版报纸、杂志或者在线主页浏览新闻，而是利用社交媒体和搜索引擎。后者可以通过演算法即一种数学公式预测读者可能想要读的新闻。

It is a world of fragments, filtered by code and delivered on demand. For news organizations, said Cory Haik, senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post, the shift represents “the great unbundling” of journalism. Just as the music industry has moved largely from selling albums to songs bought instantly online, publishers are increasingly reaching readers through individual pieces rather than complete editions of newspapers or magazines. A publication’s home page, said Edward Kim, a co-founder of SimpleReach, will soon be important more as an advertisement of its brand than as a destination for readers.

这是一个由片段构成的世界，充斥着编码，按需定制。华盛顿邮报电子新闻高级编辑克里海客说对新闻机构而言，这种转变意味着新闻业的“大分拆”。音乐界已经完成了从卖唱片到在网上随时随地售卖歌曲的大跨步。出版社也越来越多地通过散文章而不是一整期报纸或者杂志将新闻呈现给读者了。触手可及的合伙人爱德华金姆说出版社的主页很快就会成为宣传其品牌的重要平台而不是读者的阅读终端。

“People won’t type in anymore,” Ms. Haik said. “It’s search and social.”

“人们不会再输入了。”海客先生说，“一切都要依靠搜索和社交了。”

The shift raises questions about the ability of computers to curate news, a role traditionally played by editors. It also has broader implications for the way people consume information, and thus how they see the world.

该转变引发了有关电脑过滤新闻能力的问题。这一直以来都是编剧的工作。它也对人们消费信息的方式造成更多影响，进而波及人们看待世界的方式。

In an interview at Facebook’s sprawling headquarters here, which has a giant, self-driving golf cart that takes workers between buildings, Mr. Marra said he did not think too much about his impact on journalism.

脸书多栋总部大楼里有一辆巨大的自动驾驶高尔夫球车可以载着员工在楼宇之间穿行。马拉先生就是在那里接受了采访，他说他没多想自己对新闻的影响。

“We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors,” he said. “We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed. You’ve made your friends, you’ve connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you’re the best decider for the things that you care about.”

“我们明确努力不把自己看做编辑。”他说。“我们不希望你的消息内容里出现编辑式评论。你自己去结交朋友，你自己去看想看的网站，并且你是决定你要在乎的事情的最佳人选。”

In Facebook’s work on its users’ news feeds, Mr. Marra said, “we’re saying, ‘We think that of all the stuff you’ve connected yourself to, this is the stuff you’d be most interested in reading.' ”

马拉先生在谈到脸书在用户新闻消息方面所做的工作的时候，他说：“我们想说的是'我们认为你连接的任何内容都会是你最想读的东西。'”

Roughly once a week, he and his team of about 16 adjust the complex computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she first logs on to Facebook. The code is based on “thousands and thousands” of metrics, Mr. Marra said, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long readers spend on an article.

他和他的团队（16人左右）基本上每周都会调整一次决定用户在登录脸书后第一时间看到的内容的复杂电脑编码。马拉先生说这个编码建立在数以万计的权值基础之上，其中包括用户使用的设备、某个故事获得的评论数量或者点赞数量以及读者们在阅读某篇文章上花的时长。

The goal is to identify what users most enjoy, and its results vary around the world. In India, he said, people tend to share what the company calls the ABCDs: astrology, Bollywood, cricket and divinity.

目标即为找出用户最钟爱的内容。世界各地喜好差距很大。他说印度人往往会分享被脸书公司称作入门知识的内容：占星术、宝莱坞、板球和神学。

If Facebook’s algorithm smiles on a publisher, the rewards, in terms of traffic, can be enormous. If Mr. Marra and his team decide that users do not enjoy certain things, such as teaser headlines that lure readers to click through to get all the information, it can mean ruin. When Facebook made changes to its algorithm in December 2013 to emphasize higher-quality content, several so-called viral sites that had thrived there, including Upworthy, Distractify and Elite Daily, saw large declines in their traffic.

如果脸书的演算法向某位出版商露笑脸，那么该出版商的浏览量一定非常可观。如果马拉先生及其团队认为用户不喜欢某些东西，比如吸引读者一路点到底才能获取信息的戏弄标题，那它就玩完了。2013年12月脸书对演算法做出改变强调高品质内容。当时许多红极一时的所谓的热门网站浏览量大幅下跌。

Facebook executives frame the company’s relationship with publishers as mutually beneficial: when publishers promote their content on Facebook, its users have more engaging material to read, and the publishers get increased traffic driven to their sites. Numerous publications, including The New York Times, have met with Facebook officials to discuss how to improve their referral traffic.

脸书总管们将公司与出版商的关系描述为互惠。当出版商改善其在脸书上的内容质量的时候，脸书用户就有更有看头的内容可读，而出版商网站的浏览量也会增加。包括《纽约时报》在内的众多出版物都与脸书官员碰面探讨增加推荐流量的方法。

The increased traffic can potentially mean that the publisher can increase its advertising rates or convert some of those new readers into subscribers.

浏览量增加就有可能意味着出版商可以抬高其广告费或者将那些新读者转变为订阅读者。

Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn want their users to spend more time,or do more, on their services — a concept known as engagement, said Sean Munson, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies the intersection of technology and behavior.

华盛顿大学副教授肖恩芒森研究科技与行为交叉点。他说像脸书、推特和邻客音之类的社交媒体公司希望用户可以花更多时间使用其服务或者在其服务平台上做更多事情。这种观念被称作参与度。

Facebook officials say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online. Others fear that users will create their own echo chambers, and filter out coverage they do not agree with. “And that,” Mr. Munson said, “is when you get conspiracy theories.”

脸书官员称用户在其网站上停留的时间越久网络上就会有越激烈的不同意见想法交流。有人担心用户会创建自己的回音室，并且过滤掉他们不认可的报道。芒森说：“那就是你产生阴谋论的时候会有的想法。”

Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, a news and entertainment site, said his rule for writing and reporting in a fragmented age is simple: “no filler.” News organizations that still publish a print edition, he said, have slots — physical holes on paper or virtual ones on a home page — that result in the publication of stories that are not necessarily the most interesting or timely, but are required to fill the space. It was partly to discourage such slot-filling that BuzzFeed did not focus on its home page when it first started, he said.

本史密斯（蜂鸣新闻娱乐网的主编）说他在破裂时代对写作与报道定下的规矩很简单：“不要填充物。”他说那些依然在出版纸质出版物的新闻机构会出现有一些空白区-或是报纸上真真正正的空白区或是主页上的虚拟空白区。这就导致它们会出版一些单纯为填补空缺而出版的却并不一定是最有趣或最新的故事。蜂鸣在初期并没有专注于主页有一部分原因就是为了打击填充作品。

Mr. Kim of SimpleReach says he advises established media companies that “it’s dangerous to start chasing social. You’ll end up like everyone else, and you’ll lose your differentiation.” The question that older publications that are not “digital natives” like BuzzFeed have to ask themselves, Mr. Kim said, is “Are you creating content for the way that content is consumed in this environment?”

触手可及公司的金姆先生给著名的媒体公司提出建议认为“追赶社交是危险的。你最终会落得与其他人一样的下场，你会失去自己的个性。”金姆先生说像蜂鸣这样非电子出身的老出版物要扪心自问的是：“你创造的内容是按照当下环境里人们消费方式创造的吗？”

Ms. Haik, the Washington Post digital editor, is leading a team, started this year, that aims to deliver different versions of The Post’s journalism to different people, based on information about how they have come to an article, which device they are on and even, if it is a phone, which way they are holding it.

《华盛顿邮报》电子编辑海客小姐从今年起开始领导一只队伍。该队伍的目标是根据人们接触信息的方式、使用的设备，甚至如果用电话的话持电话方式来为不同的人提供不同版本的报纸内容。

“We’re asking if there’s a different kind of storytelling, not just an ideal presentation,” she said. For instance, she said, people reading The Post on a mobile phone during the day will probably want a different kind of reading experience than those who are on a Wi-Fi connection at home in the evening.

“我们在问是否有不同的讲故事方式而不只是寻求完美的展示这么简单。”她说。比如，她说那些白天用移动手机看《邮报》的人希望得到的阅读体验也许和那些晚上在家用无线的人不一样。

The Post is putting time and energy into such efforts, Ms. Haik said, because it is “ultimately about sustaining our business or growing our audience.” More than half of its mobile readers, she said, are so-called millennials who consume news digitally and largely through social media sites like Facebook. Some publications have found a niche in taking the opposite approach. The Browser is edited by Robert Cottrell, a former journalist at The Financial Times and The Economist. Mr. Cottrell skims about 1,000 articles a day, he said, and then publishes five or six that he finds interesting for about 7,000 subscribers who pay $20 a year. A recent selection included the life of an early-20th-century American bricklayer and a study of great Eastern philosophers.

海客小姐说《邮报》在花时间和经历做这样的事是因为“终极目标是维持经营以及增加读者数量。”她说《邮报》一半以上的移动读者都是所谓的千禧年一代。他们主要通过脸书之类的社交媒体网站阅读新闻。有些出版物从另一个角度出发也为自己找到立足之地。《The Browser》的编辑是罗伯特科特雷尔，他之前曾在《金融时报》和《经济学人》任职记者。科特雷尔先生说他每天大概要浏览1000篇文章。然后在其中找出五到六篇他认为有趣的文章发表以供每年付费20美元的约7，000名订阅者阅读。他最新选出的两篇文章分别是讲述一位20世纪初的美国砖匠的故事和一份对东方哲学家的研究。

“The general idea is to offer a few pieces each day which we think are both enjoyable and of lasting value,” Mr. Cottrell said. “We’re certainly at the other end of the process from the algorithms.”

“我们的主要是想每天提供几篇我们认为既有趣又有长期价值的文章。”科特雷尔先生说。“我们绝对是在演算法的另一种端。”

Artificial intelligence, he said, may eventually be able to find a piece of writing moving, in some sense, and want to share it. But for the moment, computers rely on information gathered online “and that is going to be a very, very impoverished data set compared to a human being.”

他说或许人工智能终有一天会有能力找到感人的文章并且在某种程度上想要将文章分享给别人看。不过目前电脑还是要依赖网上搜集的信息，“并且它的数据与人类相比是非常贫瘠的。”

Mr. Marra, the Facebook engineer, agrees that a human editor for each individual would be ideal. “But it’s not realistic to do that at scale for every person on the planet,” he said, “and so I think we’ll always have these hybrid systems like News Feed that are helping you find the things that you care about.” It is simply, he said, “a personalized newspaper.”

脸书工程师马拉先生也同意如果每个人都拥有一位人类编辑那会非常完美。“不过要让地球上每个人都享有这种待遇不现实。”他说道，“所以我认为我们会一直利用想动态消息这样的杂交系统帮助你寻找你在意的东西。”他说这其实就是一份“个人定制报纸了”。