Every new medium or platform you work on has some effect on the content. The stage informs the play, the medium is still the message.

But the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other erstwhile print giants who’ve thus far survived the Digital Age have less-esoteric concerns when it comes to their partnering with Facebook and Google and the like. Will new media cannibalize their business models, further reducing their currency? Or is it at long last a path forward in not just an Internet world but a mobile one as well?

In a Financial Times piece, Matthew Garrahan and Hannah Kuchler explore the new abnormal, the joining of Zuckerbergs and Sulzbergers. An excerpt:

Given the industry’s bruising experiences, it is perhaps natural that publishers have greeted the new services with a mixture of fear and optimism. Mark Thompson, chief executive of The New York Times, points to the benefits of being able to provide its news content to a vast new audience. “We’re talking about an opportunity to distribute your content at no charge at all to well over 1bn people,” he says. “[Facebook] has a larger population than the People’s Republic of China.”

But there are concerns that Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles — which are not paying for the content — will chip away at the notion of a newspaper or magazine website as a standalone brand to be digested whole, rather than broken up into individual stories and scattered across different apps. The services could “dilute [publisher] brands as destination sites and . . .  boost the platform brand”, says Gordon Crovitz, a media adviser and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Publishers have also privately voiced concerns about the power Apple and Facebook will wield and the potential harm the new aggregation services could cause to paid subscription models. Apple has told publishers its service will eventually include subscription capability and, like Facebook, has told them they will be able to keep all the advertising revenue they generate. But neither company has ruled out changing this arrangement in the future.

Facebook and Apple have a shared aim: increasing the amount of time their users spend on their services, which are increasingly being accessed via smartphones. Smartphones have become the dominant way to read news: this year will mark the first time that smartphones were responsible for 50 per cent of news consumption, up from 25 per cent in 2012, according to Ken Doctor, an analyst with Newsonomics.

Driving Facebook and Apple’s interest in news “is the arrival of the smartphone as the primary access point for many readers”, he says. A publisher who has had negotiations with both companies puts it differently. Facebook and Apple have “finally woken up to the fact that news has value on mobile.”•