People are consuming news in a whole new way. They aren’t walking to the end of the driveway, unfolding the Times or the Wall Street Journal, and then flipping through the pages. (Well, one person still does that. That’s Steve.) They aren’t even going to the webpage for the newspaper and trolling through their content. (I still do that.)
Mostly, people log onto Facebook or other social media, and then read what they’re friends are recommending. (I also do that.)
The NYT has an article about the changing modes of news consumption. ( I found this article through a link on Facebook. Very meta.) About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook. At the Washington Post, more than half of its mobile readers, are millenials who consume news digitally and largely through social media sites like Facebook.
More stats — “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…”
How does this impact the way that news is created? The article doesn’t really answer that question. Let me try.
News sources now need more content than ever, because they don’t know what will stick and what won’t. They need more and more writers to produce this content, but have less resources to pay them. So, freelancers.
They hire SEO experts, who write clever headlines that will make Facebook and Google happy. These headlines sometimes don’t reflect the content of the article, because people don’t necessary read that far into an article.
They produce a lot of the same articles that they know will appeal to the Facebook linkers. I would love to see some content analysis how the article topics have changed in the past ten years.
Apt. 11d 
I’m thinking of starting to troll Facebook. My parents don’t use it and my wife barely ever looks at it. I can’t get in much trouble.
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