Social media giant Facebook has recently launched Facebook News, a tab dedicated especially for news. So far, Facebook has signed multi-million dollar deals with popular publishers including The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Buzzfeed and many more.
📰 Introducing Facebook News - a dedicated news tab starting to roll out today in the US pic.twitter.com/Mrkx6CGWaq— Facebook (@facebook) October 25, 2019
Up till now, the feature is made available to a 'subset' of people in the United States only. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg while speaking to a launch event in New York said that although they are starting small, they aim to reach almost 30 million people with this feature in the next few years.
During the early stage, Facebook wants to feature news reporting from local cities of the U.S. that include Washington, Huston. New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Readers will be able to access news with categories 'Today's News', 'Topic Sections', 'Your Subscriptions' and 'Personalization'. They will also be able to hide articles and topics they don't want to see.
Facebook says that publishers who want to be featured on Facebook news must be verified with the site's News Page Index, which Facebook developed in collaboration with publishers to identify content. They must also adhere to Facebook's Publisher Guidelines that address violations like clickbait and hate-speech.
Facebook's exchange of large sums of direct payments for top-quality journalism sounds great for news publishing platforms but we are yet to find out if a sufficient amount of Facebook users will make use of this new tab.
