With New App, Facebook Aims to Make Its Users’ Feeds Newsier

Mark Zuckerberg dreams of a day when Facebook’s computers would know you and your habits so well that it would deliver exactly the information you want to see — what he calls “the best personalized newspaper in the world.”

As the company Mr. Zuckerberg co-founded turns 10 years old on Tuesday, it hasn’t quite achieved that mind meld with its 1.2 billion users. But it’s not for lack of trying.

On Monday, Facebook stepped more directly onto the news media’s turf, rolling out a new iPhone app called Paper that enlists a handful of human editors to supplement its computers in recommending articles and blog posts on a dozen topics, including top news, food, parenting, the environment and gay rights.

The app, which made its debut to rave reviews from tech news sites, offers users an easy way to browse their news feeds. But it also presents them with a series of minimagazines, each with a distinct tone and articles chosen by unidentified curators the company says have extensive expertise in their fields. Those editors are “painting the order and organizing the stories in a way that is rich and engaging,” said Michael Reckhow, Paper’s product manager.

Paper, which the company calls an experiment, comes on the heels of the company’s recent efforts to bring to its users more substantive articles and fewer cat videos. In December, the company made a major change to its news feed — its users’ stream of friends’ status updates, photos, videos and ads. The adjustment to its software gave more prominence to what Facebook considers “high quality” news sites and downgraded the viral videos and chain-letter appeals that it views as cluttering up the feed and making the service less appealing to users.

Together, Paper and the new news feed formula are the latest initiatives by the company to find new ways to keep its users deeply engaged. Some, like the company’s 2012 purchase of the photo-sharing service Instagram, have been wildly successful. Others, like last year’s attempt to create a smartphone focused entirely on Facebook apps, have been failures.

Facebook, which directs more traffic to web publishers than any other social network, denies that it has any plans to create original content to compete with news sites.

That sets it apart from the Internet giant Yahoo, which has partnerships with major news organizations to showcase their articles, but is also producing its own digital magazines on topics like technology and food.

“Facebook is not the container for articles and content. It’s really just a pointer,” said Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook. “We’re not trying to get into the business of writing articles and creating content.”

But the company does want to guide users to content that will keep them coming back — and expose them to more of the advertising that has propelled the company’s revenue and stock price to record levels.

The company’s vast influence over the news that people see makes some in the industry nervous. A Pew Research study in late 2013 said that one-third of adults in the United States now get their news from Facebook. And the social network accounted for one out of every six minutes Americans spent online in December, according to the research firm comScore.

Sites that rely heavily on viral content get about 80 percent of their traffic from Facebook, said Edward Kim, the chief executive of the social media tracking service SimpleReach. More traditional news sites get about 50 percent from social media. Since the algorithm has changed, Mr. Kim said, some viral sites have seen a precipitous decline in their traffic. Given Facebook’s clout, the news organizations that have come to rely on the company for large quantities of their traffic are trying to tailor content to appeal to its mysterious algorithms. They are also closely following the Paper app and the types of articles and videos that it highlights for its users.

Facebook’s Mr. Cox said web publishers had little to fear from the changes to the company’s software formula and much to gain. In January, he said, the company sent four times as many referrals to a sample group of international news and information sites as it did the previous year.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, said that Facebook was making news judgments.

Facebook, Mr. Benton said, was “still the biggest social driver for traffic for news outlets” and had a profound impact not only on how articles were presented, but also what journalists chose to cover. For example, he said, articles that focus on a single idea with visual elements do well because they are “perfect for sharing.”

Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who is now the publisher and editor in chief of The New Republic, said about half of the magazine’s web traffic came from social media, with a significant portion of that from Facebook.

Facebook has enormous influence over the delivery of news, he said. “A small ‘trending’ box, or if they change the way images are displayed, or this Paper app, can have a huge impact on how people read and share things,” Mr. Hughes said.

Facebook executives acknowledge that power, but say that their tweaking of the interface is solely to give users what they want.

When the typical user logs on to Facebook, there are about 1,600 possible items the company could show in the news feed based on that person’s friends and what pages they follow. Even the most avid user looks at only the top 200 or so. So Facebook spends a lot of time trying to make sure those top items are compelling.

The Paper app is the product of a 15-person team within the company that wanted to create an easy, attractive way to help Facebook users discover and consume compelling content. The app has a simple interface that eliminates buttons and menus.

Facebook has worked closely with about 40 content producers, ranging from big news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Associated Press to magazines like National Geographic and Time, to improve the look of their articles on the app. When readers click on an item to read it, they are taken to the website of the original publisher, which can serve ads or promote other content to them.

Paper’s initial sections and news sources have a distinctly liberal tilt. For example, the gay rights section, called “Pride,” featured items on Monday that celebrated gay fathers, gay athletes and same-sex marriage. Absent was any sense of the conflict in the country over the issues.

Just before Facebook released the app on Monday, FiftyThree, another app maker using the name Paper, asked the company to change the name of its new product. Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

Facebook said that as people downloaded and used the app, it would study what they look at and click and adjust the mix of articles and sections accordingly. “We’re very data-driven here,” said Mr. Reckhow, Paper’s product manager. “Our readers are the real editors of these sections.”