Facebook & News Corp Decides What is ‘Newsworthy’ Content

April 27th, 2014

Peter Nolan

11Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US Independent
April 26, 2014

According to a study from the Pew Research Center (PRC), 33% of young adults get their news from social media networks; while 34% watch news broadcasts on TV and a mere 13% still read newspapers or digital newspaper content.

Facebook (FB) has launched their own media resourced called FB Newswire (FBN) in order to “make it easier” for journalists and newsrooms to locate, share and embed “newsworthy” content onto the social media platform.

FBN is an attempt to bring a more “holistic” approach to global news that “is not personalized for each user.”

FB has collaborated with Storyful to bring FBN to life. This is because of a $25 million acquisition last December of the company that was once part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

FBN is being presented as a way for FB “to deepen our relationship with media organizations and journalists in the days to come.”

Aine Kerr, managing director for Storyful said: “It’s going to be journalists every step of the way deciding what is of value, what should we verify, and going off and starting what is a very rigorous process at Storyful [to verify the story].”

The key to FBN is “an algorithm [that will] find popular and breaking news sotries” on Facebook to place into categories such as:

• Technology
• Politics
• Sports
• Entertainment

After the algorithm recommends a news story, a follow up with an actual human will verify that the story is “newsworthy” by a “journalism team”.

Andy Mitchel, director of news and global partnerships for FB said : “FB Newswire is a Facebook page of hand-selected and journalist-verified news stories from across Facebook’s platform.”

Mitchell said: “News is finding a bigger audience on Facebook than ever before. Journalists and media organizations have become an integral part of Facebook, which is visible in features like Trending Topics, improvements to Pages, and recent changes to News Feed. Publishers are seeing the results of our commitment, with referral traffic from Facebook to media sites growing more than 4x in 2013.”