Facebook Reaches Out to Journalists with its Journalism Project

[engine]

Facebook is reaching out to journalists with its Journalism Project to enhance ties between it and the news industry.

The project, Facebook says, will be a collaboration effort to develop new products, to explore new storytelling formats, how to build local news, and what it calls emerging business models. It'll also be holding hackathons, and will be holding regular meetings with publishers in the US and Europe.

It's also going to provide e-learning courses on Facebook products, tools and services, including making use of its recently acquired CrowdTangle news surfacing tool.

There will also be training and tools for all Facebook members, and this will include the promotion of new literacy, and continuing efforts to curb the spread of hoax news.

[media.fb.com...]

Clearly, Facebook wants to capture a greater share of the news, and these collaborative efforts will help it learn more. The one that concerns me most is that it will hasten the expiration of local newspapers as we know it.

[incrediBILL]

Capture the news?

Facebook, just like Google, would prefer to be the provider of the content and not a user of that content.

Wouldn't shock me if some day down the road all the publications cease to exist and Facebook actually has the journalists on staff and simply cut out the middle man. It's all about advertising and there's only so many ad dollars to go around for the same sets of eyeballs so eventually another branch on the tree gets trimmed and newspapers have been on the short end of the electronic stick for quite some time.

Coming soon: The New York Times, a division of Facebook

[timchuma]

No one wants to actually go off Facebook these days any way. Is a bit annoying if you are trying to create content as Facebook is the one making all the money off it.

[tangor]

FB best watch out heading down this road. They just might have outsiders regulating their business! (Media and government among other things)

[Robert Charlton]

Also, an observation fwiw on what seems to have happened in FB since Facebook acknowledged news algorithm problems... which is that I'm seeing almost no related stories in my FB news feed... only sponsored stories or stories explicitly shared by friends. But there's now essentially nothing topically related to those shared stories, as there had been before.

I assume that, without a veracity meter, Facebook needed to pull back on the algo that drove the fake news bubble... or perhaps publishers have pulled back on their Facebook presence. I'm finding myself returning to Google News to get broader and more in depth coverage.

Perhaps in an attempt to fill a vacuum, CNN was appearing in my FB message feed... I'm guessing paid. I found that extremely annoying, and perhaps others did too, as CNN has seemed to be fading from the message feed in recent days.