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Media companies may take a huge leap of faith into a new phase of the Digital Age, or at least if everything goes according to Facebooks plan they will, The New York Times reported this week. Over recent months, the social media giant has been holding closed-door discussions with at least half a dozen media mammoths such as The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic, etching out the details of a proposed plan to host news content inside Facebook, instead of making users go to an external site.

The plan has been touted as a sure-fire way to streamline user experience by allowing links to load more quickly and letting users avoid the pesky ads that make news consumption cumbersome.

But some media observers are skeptical, saying it could destroy incentives for journalistic integrity and prevent small publishers from reaching their audience.

The companys [Facebooks] news feed algorithm is an increasingly important news filter, particularly for younger 'millennials.' That means any deeper partnerships with media groups to host their stories could be controversial, with publishers that do not sign up likely to complain vociferously if Facebooks algorithm penalises their stories as a result, wrote Stuart Dredge for the Guardian.

The ability of small publishers to reach their audience has already diminished even without the preferential treatment that Facebooks potential media collaborators could receive. In 2012, Facebook announced that organic page reach was just 16 percent. In other words, a single article posted by a news organization probably appeared in only 16 percent of the organization's followers' news feeds. By February 2014, that number had declined to 6.15 percent, and by January 2015, organic reach was practically nonexistent, the tech website Dazeinfo.com reported.

In such [a] scenario, if Facebook ties up with a bunch of leading publishers and hosts their news content, those publishers who are already facing warmth due to the fall of organic reach, will become more distressed, wrote Dazeinfo research analyst Pritha Bose.

Even for media giants, the proposed change has been characterized as a leap of faith. Most media companies are accustomed to driving traffic back to their own sites and collecting their own data on users, not to mention ad revenue. While BuzzFeed has pioneered a policy of spreading content outside its site, The New York Times uses a subscription model that accounts for a growing percentage of its revenue. Ad revenue sharing plans for the new deal with Facebook would still need to be hashed out and solidified, anonymous sources confirmed to The New York Times.

Nevertheless, some analysts say that Facebooks ability to reach a vast audience may make it worth the risk. Facebook currently has more than 1.3 billion active monthly users, about a fifth of the worlds population, and already has become the leading source of traffic for many digital publishers.

It [a media company] would have to weigh the benefits of reaching Facebooks users and the ad revenue that comes with them against the prospect of giving away its content and losing the clicks on its own site that would instead stay within Facebook, The New York Times reported.

But while Facebook has little experience participating in revenue sharing with content providers, it has been experimenting with revenue sharing options. Some of these experiments, one of which prioritizes video hosted on Facebook over other content, could be an example of what the future will hold.

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Facebook woos media giants: Will social media control the future of news? (+video)