Facebook wants more news. The company has launched FB Newswire, a real-time breaking news feed aimed at journalists that delivers breaking news content on a feed that is also sharable and embeddable on news pages and websites.
The service is being promoted by the company as a way of knowing what is happening across the globe in real-time without having to leave the social network. Journalists, however, have not been convinced, making humorous comments on their Facebook and Twitter pages over the lack of a need for the new service.
It is being styled after wire services, and has a full stream of content available for users to view and read.
It is being done in partnership with News Corp. acquisition Storyful -- which was purchased by the media conglomerate in December for $25 million -- and the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network has called the new service a way to follow those individuals and news organizations breaking news from around the globe.
In a Facebook post by Andy Mitchell, director of news and global media partnerships, the company says that "FB Newswire aggregates newsworthy content shared publicly on Facebook by individuals and organizations across the world for journalists to use in their reporting."
But in the current atmosphere of news sites and other media companies, notably Google, Yahoo and even Facebook -- it had launched a Facebook newspaper already -- many believe this is not needed and will do little to advance news coverage or even Facebook's effort to get into news aggregation.
But Facebook disagrees. "This will include original photos, videos and status updates posted by people on the front lines of major events like protests, elections and sporting events," said Mitchell.
The company believes that as a result of last year's increase in clicks on news-related links by four times, the company is well-positioned to make a go at a real-time service that allows journalists to view and see what is happening as it happens anywhere.
The new FB Newswire also comes as the company aims to cut out "like-baiting" links and others who are posting predominantly text-only links on pages. The goal is to create a more user-friendly experience that is not confounded by unreliable sources and pages.
For the media world, it could be another medium that all news sites want to get into based solely on numbers, with Facebook's more than 1 billion users globally, following in Google's path of setting the news agenda.
