Photo by Elijah O’Donnell on Unsplash
- Facebook launches ‘news tab’ section with USA TODAY and other publishers: What to expect
At a launch event Friday in New York, CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that while starting small, Facebook News could reach 20 to 30 million people in a “few years.”
During the initial phase, Facebook plans to showcase original reporting from local properties in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington, Miami, Atlanta and Boston.
“The fact that local news is part of this big Facebook rollout goes to the fact of how important trust is, and that local news is where that’s at,” says Steve Chung, chief digital officer for Fox Television Stations.
- Mark Zuckerberg makes the case for Facebook News
Zuckerberg was also asked about how Facebook will deal with accuracy and quality, particularly given the recent controversy over its unwillingness to fact check political ads.
He sidestepped the political ads question, arguing that it’s unrelated to the day’s topics, then said, “This is a different kind of thing.” In other words, he argued that the company has much more leeway here to determine what is and isn’t included — both by requiring any participating publishers to abide by Facebook’s publisher guidelines, and by hiring a team of journalists to curate the headlines that show up in the Top Stories section.
“People have a different expectation in a space dedicated to high-quality news than they do in a space where the goal is to make sure everyone can have a voice and can share their opinion,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-news/
- Facebook launches dedicated news tab in U.S.
- Facebook News launches with Breitbart as a source
On Friday, Bernstein tweeted, “One way to think about Facebook naming Breitbart a ‘trusted news source’: my investigation two years ago contained revelations so damning Breitbart funder Robert Mercer stepped down as CEO of his hedge fund. But it’s good enough for Zuck & co.”
The New York Times’ Charlie Warzel wrote in a tweet that Breitbart “being in Facebook’s trusted partners is clarifying.” Why? Well, he pointed out “it’s the same principle as dinner” with people like Fox host Tucker Carlson. Which is to say, “FB’s perspective seems to be that if you achieve a certain [amount] of scale and influence, the company will engage earnestly with you.” Warzel said “it’s an outdated idea of media power.”
At Friday’s Paley Center event, the New York Times’ Marc Tracy asked Zuckerberg about the decision to include Breitbart. Zuckerberg said he believes “you want to have content that represents different perspectives.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/26/media/facebook-news-breitbart/index.html
- Why the Facebook News tab shouldn’t be trusted
But what’s not central to Facebook’s survival will never be central to its strategy. News is not going to pay the bills, and it probably won’t cause a major change in its hallowed growth rate. Remember that Twitter, which hinges much more on news, is 1/23rd of Facebook’s market cap.
So hopefully at this point we’ve established that Facebook is not an ally of news publishers.
At best it’s a fickle fair-weather friend. And even paying out millions of dollars, which can sound like a lot in journalism land, is a tiny fraction of the $22 billion in profit it earned in 2018.
Whatever Facebook offers publishers is conditional. It’s unlikely to pay subsidies forever if the News tab doesn’t become sustainable. For newsrooms, changing game plans or reallocating resources means putting faith in Facebook it hasn’t earned.
