Over the course of its 15-year history, Facebook Inc has variously ignored news organizations while eating their advertising revenue, courted them for video projects it subsequently abandoned and then largely cut their stories out of its newsfeeds.
Now it plans to pay them for news headlines — reportedly millions of dollars in some cases.
Enter the “News Tab,” a new section in the Facebook mobile app that is to display headlines — and nothing else — from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, National Broadcasting Co, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Breitbart, a conservative news outlet that has been accused of running racist stories, is also to be part of the News Tab, as would local stories from several of the largest US cities.
Headlines from smaller towns are on their way, Facebook said.
Tapping on those headlines will take you directly to publisher Web sites or apps, if you have any installed, which is one thing publishers have been requesting from Facebook’s news efforts for years.
It is potentially a big step for a platform that has long struggled with stamping out misinformation and making nice with struggling purveyors of news, but media watchers remain skeptical that Facebook is really committed to helping sustain the news industry.
Facebook declined to detail who is getting paid and how much, saying only that it would be paying “a range of publishers for access to all of their content.”
Just last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he was not sure it “makes sense” to pay news outlets for their material.
However, now, as Zuckerberg told the Associated Press in an interview, “there’s an opportunity to set up new long-term, stable financial relationships with publishers.”
The AP is not participating in the initiative.
News executives have long been unhappy about the extent to which digital giants like Facebook make use of their stories — mostly by displaying headlines and short summaries when users post links.
A bill introduced in the US Congress earlier this year would grant an anti-trust exemption to news companies, letting them band together to negotiate payments from the big tech platforms.
“It’s a good direction that they’re willing for the first time to value and pay for news content,” said David Chavern, head of the News Media Alliance, a publisher trade group. “The trouble is that most publishers aren’t included.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook aims to set up partnerships with a “wide range” of publishers.
“We think that this is an opportunity to build something quite meaningful here,” he said. “We’re going to have journalists curating this; we are really focused on provenance and branding, and where the stories come from.”
At an event on Friday in New York, Zuckerberg was asked why Facebook is not paying all publishers in the news section.
The initial focus was on building a broad set of content and figuring how to compensate publishers with paywalls, he said.
The next step would be to add local and international sources to the tab, he added.
Facebook last year killed its most recent effort to curate news, the ill-fated “Trending” topics. Conservatives complained about political bias, leading Facebook to fire its human editors and automate the section until it began recycling false stories, after which the social media giant shut it down entirely.
However, what happens when the sprawling social network plays news editor?
An approach that sends people news based on what they have liked before could over time elevate stories with greater “emotional resonance” over news that “allows public discourse to take place,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It deepens my concern that they’ll be applying Facebook logic to news judgement,” he added.
The social network has again come under criticism for its news judgement.
Last month, it removed a fact-check from “Science Feedback” that called out an anti-abortion activist’s video for claiming that abortion is never medically necessary.
US Republican senators had complained about the fact check.
Asked at the event on Friday why Breitbart was included in the News Tab, Zuckerberg said that the company wants a “breadth of content.”
A small team of “seasoned” journalists it employs are to choose the headlines for the “Today’s Story” section of the tab, designed to “catch you up” on the day’s news, Facebook said.
The rest of the news section is to be populated with stories algorithmically based on users’ interests, it said.
That sounds similar to the approach taken by Apple News, a free iPhone app.
However, Apple Inc’s effort to contract with news organizations has been slow to take off. Apple News Plus, a US $10 per month paid version, remains primarily a hub for magazines; other news publishers have largely sat it out.
Apple’s service reportedly offered publishers only half the revenue it pulled in from subscriptions, divided according to how popular publishers were with readers.
Zuckerberg said that he hopes to have 20 to 30 million people in the US using the News Tab over a few years.
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