Facebook News launches with hand-picked stories from major publishers – By Salvador Rodriguez (CNBC) / Oct 25 2019
- Facebook on Friday announced the launch of Facebook News, a new section of the social network that will show users a personalized selection of news stories.
- The company has been working on the project for months, and it will reportedly pay as much as millions of dollars to news publications for licensing fees to run their stories on Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Campbell Brown speaks onstage at the Peabody-Facebook Futures Of Media Awards at Hotel Eventi on May 19, 2017 in New York City. Getty Images
Facebook on Friday announced the launch of Facebook News, a new section of the social network that will show users a personalized selection of news stories.
“News gives people more control over the stories they see, and the ability to explore a wider range of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app,” the company said in an announcement of the new product.
The move comes as Facebook has struggled to curb the viral sharing of false information on its service. The company came under criticism in 2016 after a former Facebook employee told Gizmodo that the company routinely suppressed news stories that were of interest to conservative readers in its “trending” news section. Facebook denied the allegations, but it ultimately killed the trending news feature in 2018. More recently, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced criticism for Facebook’s policy of allowing political ads with false information to run on the site.
Facebook has been working on the News project for months, and it will pay as much as millions of dollars to news publications for licensing fees to run their stories on Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal. For subscription-based publications, users will be able to read stories syndicated on Facebook for free, but will have to pay if they click through to other stories, Vox reports.
The company will launch the project at a public event in New York on Friday, with News Corp CEO Robert Thomson sharing the stage with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Thomson and News Corp Chairman Murdoch have called for online giants like Facebook and Google to pay for news content, similar to how cable TV providers pay networks for the right to broadcast their programming.
Facebook News will include local reporting for large cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. At launch, the product will be shown only to a subset of users in the U.S.
Among the publications that will be shown in Facebook News are the Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp), Washington Post, USA Today (owned by Gannett), Buzzfeed and NBCUniversal, which includes CNBC.
The stories included in Facebook News will be chosen by a team of journalists.
“This team is independent, free from editorial intervention by anyone at the company,” the company said. “They will select stories based on publicly available guidelines, which you can learn about at facebook.com/news.”
