Facebook Announces Program to Help News Sites

Facebook announced a new feature called Facebook News. Facebook News was created in partnership with the journalism industry. Given Facebook’s popularity, Facebook News may become a significant source of audience growth for publishers.

Facebook News Has Five Features

Facebook will make the news accessible via a News tab. Within this tab users will be able access news through four features and be able to personalize the news with a fifth Facebook News feature.

One of the features is the “Today’s Stories” section that highlights the top stories of the day. Journalists didn’t trust Facebook’s algorithms to select the news of the day. So the top featured news will be manually curated by a dedicated team of journalists.

Facebook will also make it easier for users who pay for subscriptions to be able to access their news straight from Facebook.

These are the five features:

“Today’s Stories
chosen by a team of journalists to catch you up on the news throughout the day

Personalization
based on the news you read, share and follow, so you can find new interests and topics and Facebook News is fresh and interesting every time you open it

Topic sections
to dive deeper into business, entertainment, health, science & tech, and sports

Your Subscriptions
a section for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account

Controls
to hide articles, topics and publishers you don’t want to see “

What Kinds of News Publishers Will be Shown?

Facebook News has created four categories of publishers:

1. General News
2. Topical News
3. Diverse News
4. Local News

General News
are publishers who address the wide range of news from sports, politics, etc.

Topical News
are publishers that are specific to a vertical. Users will have access to news verticals such as science, sports, entertainment and receive news specific to those verticals.

Diverse (?)
This category provides news along racial and ethnic divisions. Diversity means more than just ethnicity and skin color.

Curiously, Facebook excludes LGBT news. Perhaps they are following Google’s lead in excluding sexual orientation but it seems odd to exclude what is generally estimated to be 4.5% of the population and higher.

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-news/332297/#close