Interviewer: This is an interesting story to me Josh because on one hand it acknowledges that people are starting their internetting, I made up that verb, on Facebook. But Facebook wanted to take maybe more control of what happens when they're done with Facebook.

Joshua Benton: Absolutely, Facebook is an obvious interest in getting you to come back to Facebook regularly and not to leave really. So the idea that it was that news was built around linking and sending people to publisher websites is something that they're very interested in getting rid of. They say that websites of publishers are subpar, their mobile experience is loaded too slowly, and they think that bringing that content into Facebook can give a better experience for users and obviously make Facebook's more money along the way.

Interviewer: Yeah, I have often heard Mark Zuckerberg talk about this notion of Facebook as a newspaper, as Facebook with a place where you get all the information that's relevant to you and Facebook will guide you to the things that matter to you. Is that the goal here or does it just seem like they want the ad dollars, the few ad dollars that journalism is providing right now?

Joshua Benton: Well, I do think they think that news is key to making Facebook a regular daily or morning daily habit. I think that's one reason that they're interested in this space. I think beyond that, Facebook has two huge edges over publishers. One is scale as you've mentioned. They're just so enormous.

The second is that they have the best set of user data available. They know what you're interested in, they know what you've been looking for and looking at. And they think that they can use that ad technology and that user data to sell ads that are more targeted than the New York Times, or, Buzzfeed or anyone else could. I think that's the edge that they think they're seeing and they want to make sure that there's going to be good content for their users, and they're willing to make the sort of a deal and think they'll come out ahead in the end.

Interviewer: Yeah, it is interesting. I mean I feel like the biggest risk here is not giving people what they want but giving people what they don't know they want, and the things that they need to know as citizens in society. I realize that's you know that's been going on that debate for hundreds of years in the hallways of journalistic outlets. But I wonder Facebook's so clearly driven on monetizing clicks and putting relevant information up in front of people, that the stories that maybe enrich our lives or the things we don't want to know about, we have to know about won't happened if Facebook is the provider or decider of what we see in the news.

Joshua Benton: I think that's very real point. I mean the New York Times and other publishers have seen a real decrease in their home page traffic. People saying I want to know what the New York Times thinks is important right now, that editorial decision. So much more of our discovery of news these days comes through these social platforms, which can be wonderful in it in lots of ways but do rely on your friends or the people that you choose to follow whatever platform to be your guide through that.

And I think as the more that shifts to Facebook and the more that shifts to other social platforms, that's a real concern. The flip side is that they're able to figure out what's important or interesting to me in a way that one newspaper editor in Manhattan isn't able to. That's the trade-off.

Interviewer: You know we've seen in a long history of this. Yahoo, AOL, even Google sort of trying to do things like this which is organize our news for us. Is this effort substantially different?

Joshua Benton: It is different in that Google News, for example, is one parallel that brings in you know many hundreds and thousands of news sources into one searchable database. The difference though is that Google News, once you find out the news, it sends you on a link to go to NYTimes.com or Bloomberg.com or some other web site. The difference here is they want to keep the entire experience within Facebook. And that's why there has to be a business deal and that's why companies like the Times are interested in getting that trade off of better ad technology, better targeting, for a little bit of the loss of independence.

Interviewer: I mean, it does seem kind of idiotic to me if the publishers were to hand over the keys of the kingdom. And even if the advertising deal is good now, if user habits form, digital user habits, form around Facebook as the gatekeeper, Facebook can then determine exactly what the future of journalism of pay will be for all these media outlets.

Joshua Benton: I think you're right that it's very risky. And I think that any publisher that's going into this will be looking to evaluate how it's working and what kind of results it's producing, both financially in terms of user behavior. I think that the trade off though is that news organizations have been thinking about that same fight.

We want to maintain the relationship, the customer attachment point. At a certain point, does that just become a losing argument? You know a lot of people's habits have just shifted to Facebook and Twitter. Do you sort of complain about that and hope they would change their minds or do you try to engage with them on the platform that they're wanting their news on?

Interviewer: I mean I don't want to join the chorus ripping at Buzzfeed, but I think it's kind of telling that Buzzfeed, which is optimized towards clicks, not public service, was among the very few journalistic outlets being vetted for this new business.

Joshua Benton: Well you know I'll defend Buzzfeed a bit. They certainly do a lot of stuff that doesn't meet Times-ian standards. But they also have a lot of really good journalists that are trying to move in a direction of having this sort of two tiers of content.

The equation is different for Buzzfeed because Buzzfeed doesn't do traditional banner advertising. Having your content appear on Facebook is a different trade off than it is for The New York Times, for example, which has a paywall, which has a subscription model, which has an entirely different cost structure. It's a different measurement.