Filip Struhárik, a Slovak journalist working for the alternative newspaper DennikN, reports that media with Facebook pages in Slovakia are seeing dramatically less interactions.

The reason is that Facebook is experimenting with the newsfeed. It has moved the posts from pages linked to newspapers and other media to the ‘explorefeed’ to keep them separate from your regular feed where you see posts from friends and family.

The new feed is being tested in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.

Some think that the move is a way to make more money. If newspapers want their posts to be seen by lots of people, they may have to pay to promote their stories.

If you have a page on Facebook you will surely know how Facebook tries to convince you to pay small amounts of money to put your posts in people’s newsfeeds, based on interests they have that you can select. You can create a target audience, but it comes at a prize.

For many newspapers, who are often already struggling financially, this new feed can be quite painful, if not disastrous, since Facebook is a major, if not the biggest, tool to get clicks. And in today’s media landscape clicks mean money, and they mean jobs. If your articles don’t draw enough visitors you are on your way out, if you work for a newspaper.

PS

As a user I find this explorefeed very practical. No more posts about what people are eating, which bars they are in, or whose baby ate a banana for the first time, just news article. I actually created a friendless Facebook account on the side to only see news, but now I can just click on explorefeed, and gone are the posts à la: ‘I want to buy a new car, which one should I buy?’ and other irrelevant attention seeking disguised as needing help…