Facebook Launches a Newswire to Surface More Breaking News
Facebook wants to be your digital newspaper, and it's not beating around the bush to make that happen.
The social network launched FB Newswire on Thursday, a Facebook page of hand-selected and journalist-verified news stories from across Facebook's platform, according to Andy Mitchell, director of news and global media partnerships at Facebook.
The key to FB Newswire is a partnership with Storyful, a news agency that aggregates news content shared on social networks. Storyful has three offices on different continents, including a team of journalists in each office that work to verify news as it is shared over social media, according to Aine Kerr, managing editor at Storyful.
The agency will use an algorithm to find popular and breaking news stories on Facebook in categories like sports, entertainment, tech and politics. Storyful will then follow up on these stories using human verification from its journalism team before surfacing that content on FB Newswire.
'It's going to be journalists every step of the way deciding what is of value, what should we verify, and going off and starting what is a very rigorous process at Storyful [to verify the story],' Kerr said.
FB Newswire will include stories from around the word, including stories in languages other than English. (The captions will all be in English, though.) There's no target for how many stories Facebook and Storyful plan to surface each day, Kerr said; rather, the emphasis will be placed on quality of content.
Unlike the News Feed, through which Facebook tries to give users a personalized newspaper experience, the FB Newswire is more holistic, listing news from all over the world that isn't personalized for each user. Subscribing to the newswire is easy: Simply Like the FB Newswire Page, and those stories will appear in your News Feed.
The move is competitive for Facebook, which is working to keep up with Twitter in the realm of breaking news. Both companies want to become the platform of choice for news consumers, and Facebook has improved in that regard over the past year. In August, Facebook started allowing publications to embed posts within stories, and in January rolled out a trending topics feature next to News Feed.
The results have been measurable. Referral traffic to news and publishing sites - or traffic driven by users clicking on a story they come across on Facebook - quadrupled in 2013, according to Mitchell.
Facebook will target journalists with FB Newswire, but any Facebook user is welcome to Like the page. Mitchell said the move is not intended as an attack on Twitter, calling the two services 'complimentary.'
'What we're trying to do is make sure journalists have as many choices [and] first-person content as possible so they can tell the most complete story they can,' he said. Facebook is also releasing a Twitter handle for the service, called @FBNewswire, along with the feed. That being said, only content shared to Facebook will surface on the FB Newswire, at least for now, Kerr said.
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