Lavrusik breaks down the new “subscribe” feature, the “timeline” profile format, and what the real-time homepage ticker means for news organizations.

The takeaway: The central News Feed highlights “top stories” based on what’s popular among your friends and the types of news items you’ve liked or interacted with in the past, and the smaller Real-Time Ticker on the right is meant to expose you to breaking news, faster. So one portion is ruled by fancy algorithms that will continue to learn from you and improve over time, and the other portion essentially acts as a Twitter feed.

But not everyone is a fan of the new changes. Gizmodo‘s Mat Honan decries the “forced exposure” of passive sharing social apps such as Spotify and the Washington Post Social Reader, while The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal asks whether a computer algorithm is capable of understanding the concept of “meaning.”

By adding a small piece of code to the header of the story, publications can nudge Google News to spotlight that particular story:

Standout is only one signal among many — it won’t on its own influence stories’ placement on Google News — but it’s one way for news orgs to tell Google, essentially, “This is our best stuff.” (And then to ask Google: “Um, could you please highlight it?”)

They’ve also implemented controls to prevent websites from abusing the system:

But what’s to prevent web sites from marking every story they publish as “standout”? Google is limiting news organizations from tagging their own content more than seven times per week; blow past that speed limit and your tagged content will get throttled or ignored outright.

One aspect of the Standout tag that’s getting a lot of attention is the ability to tag other people’s work as “standout,” essentially encouraging publications to play nice with one another and recognize each others’ work. (There’s no limit to how often you can standout other pubs’ work.) But will old school news outlets, who are already loathe to link out to their competitors, play along? Google is betting that positive reinforcement will nudge them in the right direction.

[Pressman Ed] Padgett said a senior vice president told the pressroom “we’ve got three years more of printing the hard copy Times before they shut it down. Our plant manager says five years.”