Facebook is planning on bringing the news to your News Feed with its own dedicated Facebook News tab. The dedicated tab will be added to the platform’s mobile app showing headlines from a selected number of publications.
Currently in its testing phase, the tab has been rolled out to selected users in the United States. The test app includes hosted content from The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Buzzfeed. The news feature will incorporate four categories including general, topical, diverse and local news. Additionally, news topics will cover business, entertainment, science, technology and more.
Users will be able to personalise the tab to control which publishers they see within the feed and filter which content is of interest.
Facebook News will also allow users to subscribe to publishers, which will be visible in a dedicated subscriptions section.
In a blog post Facebook, said: “People want and benefit from personalised experiences on Facebook, but we know there is reporting that transcends individual experience. We want to support both.
“News gives people more control over the stories they see, and the ability to explore a wider range of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app. News articles will continue to appear in News Feeds as they do today.
“As we talked to people and publishers, we identified key features to help make Facebook News valuable:
Today’s Stories – chosen by a team of journalists to catch you up on the news throughout the day.
Personalistation – based on the news you read, share and follow, so you can find news interests and topics and Facebook News is fresh and interesting every time you open it.
Topic Sections – to dive deeper into business, entertainment, health, science & tech and sports.
Your Subscriptions – a section for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account.
Controls – to hide articles, topics and publishers you don’t want to see.”
It will be interesting to see how the Facebook News tab plays out on the social media platform. Will people divert away from their News Feed to look at the latest news – given that news stories already make up part of a user’s News Feed?
One thing we may see with this feature, is more focus on high-quality news stories, rather than the click bait content we see so frequently on the channel.
In the news
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