The Social Network
Farhod Manjoo, writing in the New York Times, is shocked, shocked, that Facebook regards itself primarily as a social network rather than a news site, and he finds it troubling since so many people say they get their news from Facebook.
I'll agree that Facebook has been sending mixed signals, given its recent overtures to news organizations and other publishers. But it should come as no surprise that Facebook is reaffirming that its core mission is to keep its users engaged with friends and family. Facebook will always favor those tools that allow it to maximize the amount of time its users spend on the site, and thus the amount of data it can glean from them, since Facebook users are the product, after all, and not the customer. (See this post from my old blog about what happens when companies forget what business they are in.)
Manjoo implicitly suggests that Facebook has a moral obligation to provide its users with the news that they apparently aren't consuming elsewhere. In other words, if we aren't eating our vegetables, then Facebook should force-feed them to us. I remember a similar argument being employed against Craig's List back in the day: You're giving away the product we used to charge for (classifieds) and therefore you have a duty to provide the one that we have always given away for free (the news).
It is true that we now live in echo chambers of our own design, but we were building them before Facebook came along, and traditional news organization were losing their footing long before then as well. I, too, am troubled by the implications for our civic health, and the social contract, of a nation whose denizens merely seek out beliefs that reinforce their own. But I don't expect organizations like Facebook to save us from ourselves.
The place for designated news outlets will need to adapt beyond the Facebook model as headlines are getting closer and closer to real-time. 3 days ago, I woke up and read, in real time, as explosions and gun shots rang out in an Istanbul airport. A day later, it was in my morning newsfeed on Facebook, and later still for comprehensive television coverage. The morning I followed the story as it unfolded, I had casually opened Reddit–the TriVaGo of internet sharing. Reddit has what Facebook doesn't: a direct line into the internet zeitgeist. That is what it does best... that is its products. Which is a reflection of exactly what you said, "Facebook users are the product." As far as I know, no one has called upon Reddit (or similar "front pages") to meet some journalist standard... I think they know better. It's the absence of excessive structure that makes Reddit work–sometimes in uncomfortable ways, but still...