Facebook, on Friday, 25 October, on its blog, announced its decision to re-enter the news business through partnerships with journalism outlets and a specialised “News” tab meant to steer users toward curated national as well as local stories.
Acknowledging that “journalism plays a critical role in our democracy,” the blog, written by Campbell Brown, VP, Global News Partnerships and Mona Sarantakos, Product Manager, News, stated that the social media giant is “starting to test Facebook News, a dedicated place for news on Facebook, to a subset of people in the US.” According to a Washington Post report, a broader rollout is expected early in 2020.
Facebook claimed that its news offering will allow users more control over the stories they see, and give them the ability to explore a wider range within their news interests directly within the Facebook app.
The news articles, however, will continue to appear in the News Feed as they currently do.
This marks a new phase in Facebook’s approach to the distribution of online news on its platform. Prior to January 2018, the company was a leading distributor of news, but that role was dogged by false and misleading information and news feeds.
Facebook, on its official blog, announced that it will essentially come under the following key features:
- Today’s Stories chosen by a team of journalists to catch readers up on the news throughout the day
- Personalisation: This is based on the news a user reads, shares and follows, so users can find new interests and topics, thereby making Facebook News appealing to the user.
- Topic sections: to dive deeper into business, entertainment, health, science & tech, and sports.
- Subscriptions: a section for users who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account
- Controls: to hide articles, topics and publishers users don’t want to see
Facebook News will feature a wide range of content across four categories of publishers: general, topical, diverse and local news.
Facebook said it surveyed 100,000 people on Facebook in the US about the topics they were most interested in and found that it was under-serving many topics people wanted the most in their News Feeds.
The survey revealed it was under-serving categories like entertainment, health, business and sports.
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