LyrArc Article Gist
Britain's prime minister David Cameron is having finance minister Osborne lead the negotiations with Germany and France on treaty changes for Britain to stay in the European Union, following his election promise to hold a referendum by 2017. The discussion about the prospects for changes show how difficult it will be for Britain to get the changes in the next 2 years. German chancellor Merkel supports Britain staying in the EU but only up to a point, and German public opinion does not show strong support for the kind of changes on immigration that Cameron is seeking. Support is also declining in countries like Poland because of the immigration issue. Merkel would like to see Britain in because of its open economy, free markets, and also because German contributions to the EU budget would increase significantly with the exit of Britain. Northern countries such as Sweden would also favor an effort to keep Britain inside the EU. On defence and foreign affairs EU without Britain would not carry the same weight and influence. Inside Britain Cameron faces problems with Euroskeptics inside the Conservative Party, and with the 13% popular vote that went to the UK Independence Party in the recent election. The uncertainty is not good for business and the economy of Britain, which is why Cameron is considering holding the referendum on the EU in 2016....

LyrArc Article Gist
As it grows into a significant player in mobile advertising with about 35% of all mobile advertising, Facebook is looking for ways to put news content on its site. Earlier efforts were less successful. The Ice Bucket Challenge showed some publishers the risks of using a social media platform for news content. With Facebook users spending most of the summer posting videos of people getting water poured on them to raise funds to fight ALS, less links to news sites were shared with users. An initiative called Social Reader in 2011 with the Washington Post was designed to create a sort of newspaper for Facebook, but fizzled out in 1 year after readers found any post opened going to all friends creating a spam effect. Another problem is that news stories are slow to appear on mobile phones. Instant Articles is the latest effort by Facebook to publish news content on its site. Users would not link back to the news website but stay on Facebook. It makes news websites dependent on Facebook in the long run, say news publishers. They are wary of this because economic arrangements such as Facebook giving 100% of the money from ads posted against an article, can change over time. As of March 2015, according to Parse.ly analytics firm, Facebook was the source of 27% news traffic to all news sites, Google 22.7%. Editors of news sites now write headlines in a way that are optimized to appear higher up in search results....