Facebook may introduce a dedicated tab for ‘high-quality’ news

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company might introduce a dedicated news tab sometime in the future.

In a broad discussion about technology with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Zuckerberg floated around the idea of his company directly supporting news publications that offer “high-quality content” through a section on Facebook.

Zuckerberg suggested that the service would be free to Facebook users, while news organizations will get some sort of licensing fee. In the past, Facebook hasn’t opted to give outlets a cut of ad revenue rather than outright paying them.

“You know, in News Feed, primarily people come to the service to connect with friends, to get updates on people’s day to day lives. There’s a lot of news content in there because it’s so important. But there’s a lot of people who have a demand to want more news,” said Zuckerberg during the conversation.

“I think there are going to be, call it 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of people in our community, who really want to go deep and have an experience which is — that they can go to that’s all news that will give us hopefully the ability to dramatically increase the distribution and, if it’s successful, the monetization to high-quality participants in the ecosystem so that’s something I’m personally excited about.”

Zuckerberg didn’t say when the feature might roll out, specifically.

However, the feature would be the latest in a line of efforts from the company to support news organizations. In January 2017, Facebook launched its Journalism Project to establish stronger ties to the news industry, an initiative it has since leveraged in its ongoing battle to combat the spread of fake news on its platform.

In Canada, Facebook recently invested $2.5 million into local news outlets, following the launch of a Canadian third-party fact-checking program last June.

Via: Recode