If global headlines are anything to go by, Facebook is proving to be no “friend” of public interest journalism. Government inquiries across the globe into the platform’s handling of fake accounts, advertising, privacy, and hate speech has revealed how social media sites pillage and plunder the information highway once dominated by traditional mainstream outlets (see, e.g., Halpern 2019; Hern 2017). Those in the business of news accuse Facebook of cannibalising content, gobbling up advertising revenue, and sharing information generated from the sweat and toil of “credible” journalists. Facebook teaches us an important, yet under-appreciated, lesson when it comes to understanding the future of news and journalism in the digital age – the power of the “social.” Our initial essay highlights an urgent need to refocus our attention on journalism’s relationship to the broader social sphere. Too much scholarship and industry discussion now equates the “social” with technology and social networking sites as if they are one in the same. This, we suggest, devalues traditional and important scholarship that provides scope to consider the social in terms of our everyday integrations within which our social lives help us to make sense of who we are as individuals and ultimately as collectives. In our argument about the power of social interactions, we also critique the scholarship and journalism that is said to be of and for publics. In other words, long-held convictions that journalism forms and provides a “public sphere” ignores the need to appreciate social aspects of storytelling, wayfinding and journalism. We argue that social elements of journalism that are sometimes cast aside as “soft news” – that about community events and obituaries to the way journalists can or might connect people socially – are just as important to society as those said to spark public discussion and debate.