Social media giant Facebook is preparing to bring about another revolution – this time in the field of news. While this attempt goes years back when the company launched a dedicated ‘News’ segment on its platform, it was pulled down owing to several issues including lack of user interest and allegations of not being able to filter fake news.
The company, however, is trying to make another effort to establish itself in the segment, if reports and company’s media statements are anything to go by.
According to reports, Facebook has quietly introduced a dedicated ‘News’ tab on its platform that will highlight the most important national stories of the day across several categories. This feature is currently in testing phase and available for users in the US.
The dedicated ‘News’ tab is aimed at giving people more control over the stories they see, and gives them the ability to explore a wider area of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app, the company said in a statement Friday.
Reports suggest that news articles will continue to appear in News Feed as they do now. However, under the dedicated ‘News’ tab, ‘Today’s Stories’ will be selected by a team of journalists. This feature will allow personalisation based on the news you are likely to read, share and follow.
The freshly designed ‘News’ tab will have topic sections to allow users to go deeper into business, entertainment, health, science and tech and sports categories.
“Subscriptions will be a section for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account and they will have control to hide articles, topics and publishers they don’t want to see,” said Campbell Brown, VP, Global News Partnerships at Facebook.
Facebook claims, it aims to serve both people and news publishers, and not just the big national players.
“We want new forms of journalism in the digital age, including individual, independent journalism, to flourish. So we will continue to expand the algorithmic selection of stories driving the majority of Facebook News,” said the company.
The ‘News’ tab will feature a wide range of content across four major categories of publishers such as general, topical, diverse and local news. During the initial testing phase, Facebook will showcase local original reporting by surfacing local publications from the largest major metro areas across the US.
“In the coming months, we’ll include local news from the Today In, our local news and community information tab, which recently expanded to over 6,000 US towns and cities,” said Facebook.