Something like a year ago I had conversations – entirely independent of each other – with very high level publishing executives at two of Facebook’s newly announced partners for Instant Articles. They came from two of the more venerable names on the list. And this was when Facebook was first pitching them on the idea of this co-publishing project, deep under the veil of tightly woven NDAs. As they related it to me, in these initial conversations with the traveling Facebook execs, their first reactions to their faces was some variant of “you’ve got to be f-cking kidding.”
To which the Facebookers replied with a mix of genuine surprise and restrained indifference.
