Facebook Close To Start Its News Section

Facebook has recently inked a deal with News Corp, in order to disseminate news to its portal, the company has been working on the news section for a long now and all set to feature stories in the news section the Wall Street Journal has reported.

News Corp accommodates many renowned publications including Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Business Insider and some others. Facebook might launch the news service by the end of this month.

It was reported a couple of months ago that Facebook is seriously working on curated top stories on its platform which would be different from the traditional newsfeed on Facebook. The News section would curate top stories from various sources and there would also be human involvement in selecting top stories by the team of editors as Facebook did previously and got demeaned, it was also reported that Facebook is willing to pay millions to publishers in order to bring top news content to their website.

However, Facebook had previously been unsuccessful to develop a strong News platform, according to Verge, the company was blamed for curating the same publications over and over again, there was a human intervention in selecting stories and show them to users which resulted in bias and unfair collection of News.

If we look at the current deal with News Corp, the news curation algorithm can show us little diversity with the variety of sources, however, the sources as not as diverse as Google News. Facebook might face another failure in this attempt. Google News itself takes news from around the world and includes them in top stories according to the user’s demographics, location, interests and other factors that result in the News people want.

The news stories from some selected sources e.g. New York Times, Washington Post, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed News and some others may not still work the way social media giant is looking at. However, the deal with the publishers might help people on social media to have access to the exclusive stories that require subscriptions. Facebook in a deal has discussed the subscription model and licensing fees which Facebook will pay to News Corp in order to get their stories on the Social Media platform.

While commenting on the News development CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “People want to see high-quality news on Facebook. I’m excited we’ll have the opportunity to include award-winning journalism from The Wall Street Journal [and other U.S. News Corp properties] in our news tab.” Once the Facebook News section is up running, the team of editors would select the top stories in the headlines section. However, the rest of the headlines would be selected by algorithms. The algorithm will apparently find content in a “suggested for you” section which suggests that it could optimize results based on what it thinks you’ll be interested in.

Facebook has not yet announced the development of news in its product news section, we might see some updates about Facebook Products in this section which would give us more idea about how Facebook News would work in the future.