Facebook Launches News Tab to Select Users in USA, Publishers to get Paid for Content
Facebook on Friday unveiled a new tab that is dedicated entirely to news content with an intention to bring users back to the site regularly to consume news on sports, entertainment, business, politics and tech.
The new tab, which is currently being tested on 200,000 select users in the United States, will offer stories from a mix of publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as digital-only outlets like BuzzFeed and Business Insider. It will become widely available to all Facebook users in a few months.
Through deals with national and local publishers, Facebook says the aim is to make it easier for users to locate the day’s major headlines, as well as stories geared toward particular topics or locales.
Some of the stories will be chosen by a team of professional journalists lead by former CNN journalist and Facebook’s vice president for global news partnerships, Campbell Brown. Apart from the chosen stories, other news items will be tailored to readers’ interests over time using Facebook’s machine-learning technology.
The news tab will have a section called Today’s Stories, which will feature the day’s top events. In addition, Facebook says the tab is personalized based users read, with the tab serving up a better reflection of your interests over time. Users will also be able to personalize the tab by using controls to hide publishers, articles, and subjects one is not interested in seeing.
As with any other general news publication, Facebook News includes dedicated sections for business, entertainment, science and technology, health, and sports. If you subscribe to one or more of the publishers in the tab, you can view those subscriptions in a dedicated section.
While Facebook will pay publishers for their content, to qualify for inclusion, a publisher will need to register as news pages and follow the company’s publisher guidelines. They have to have a “sufficiently large audience,” and they are forbidden from posting misinformation, hate speech, or other violations of Facebook’s community standards.
