This is sort of like Amazon announcing that it wants to strengthen its partnership with mom-and-pop shops, and help those mom-and-pop shops sell products in new and innovative ways.<p>I'm a former journalist who used to work for a metro daily newspaper that has long suffered, as most newspapers have, from declining ad revenue.<p>For these papers, the only reason to partner with Facebook is because they feel they have little choice. They would much rather have a healthy revenue stream and be self-sufficient.<p>But so far, the news industry has not found anything that adequately replaces the print-ad-driven business model that served it so well for so long.<p>So they're willing to try just about anything -- including, apparently, accepting a dinner invitation from a reputed cannibal.
Is there anything Zuckerberg <i>doesn't</i> want to get his company involved with?<p>It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually gives Facebook a run for its money.<p>Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.
I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.
I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.
Notably absent:<p>Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager, pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for monetization both as advertising targets and content generators!<p>Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there, nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it reminds me too much of AOL.
Facebook wants to solidify being a content portal for news. Its competition is Google with AMP, Google and other search engines without AMP, and first-party content producers, and 'orthodox news aggregators'. Both Facebook and Google have an advantage: they have hyperlocal info and tons of data on users collected through their tracking and ad networks, they are two of the most-visited websites and most-used apps in the world; meanwhile they subsume all the advantages of an old-style news aggregator by having a wide variety of third-party content they never had to pay for.<p>'Emerging business models': Facebook is a large IdP containing identities that they monetize through data mining with the goal of display ads. But this IdP allows their users to log in to other sites and engage in microtransaction-like behavior. Aside from making actual payments to FB, users could trade off 'ad credits' or whatnot. Flattr, Webpass are in this space; Google tried this with Contributor [1], which is about to see a revamp; Brendan Eich is trying this with Brave, but Facebook's install base and ability to focus and deliver means they could probably pull this off better than everyone else.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-signups" rel="nofollow">https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-...</a>
There's a continuing thread through these 'fake news' and 'new journalism' discussions, namely that there is a need for express interference in information circulation. This is premised upon the notion that there is a defect in circulation, but little discussion of the actual details of that circulation, its aims, and its qualities. The result is a discussion which has no direction, buffetted to and fro by the winds of self-interested parties.<p>Is there any appetite to begin a multi-disciplinary conversation about what constitutes an effective conversation? I feel as if there's disconnect here, one that leaves us all poorer, if only intellectually, as a result.
Oh come on, everyone and their mom knows Fakebook is the prime peddler of corporate and government bullshit; smearing more lip stick on that pig changes nothing.
I think this can only be positive. The status quo now is that real journalism is dying while clickbait nonsense makes makes money. If Facebook can work with traditional news agencies, whose strengths are their rigorous fact checking and journalistic integrity, to help them monetize more effectively then everyone wins.
I love this. I don't think FB is the stream of consciousness feed it once was. So why not embrace a new use case: A one stop news shop for both micro & macro news!
Here's a big punchline buried in this release: crowdtangle is now free. That's $30k value (+/- number of seats) given away to struggling news organizations.
It would be amazing if FB was to try & use sentiment analysis to offer opposite stories for every issue. Maybe that would help people to see more sides to an issue.
It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time that journalists have to vet and verify content.<p>Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with reckless abandon.<p>Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at the problem and 1) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts Facebook 2) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts news orgs. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan needs to taken as religious dogma -- everybody gets as voice and Facebook has no say in who can't speak.<p>To any news tweeps reading: combating "fake news" by partnering with Facebook is a partisan attempt at self-fellatio -- all you do is get yourself off without accomplishing anything. Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff that have the time to do their job and anonymously share it with the public is the only way to restore trust, not 1) procuring access to high-value talking heads (eg: celebrities, pundits, "experts") that will regurgitate your propaganda or 2) shoving out unverified garbage (eg: 99% of reporting on Trump this past election cycle) at light-speed.<p>#1 is just a sad attempt at remaining relevant while having someone authoritative make an empty appeal to viewers and #2 is plain laziness.