This piece originally appeared in The Telegraph.
The internet has disrupted long-established business models in all sorts of industries, but there are few where its impact has raised more profound questions for society than the news industry. High quality journalism is at the heart of how open societies function — informing and empowering citizens and holding the powerful to account. But when advertisements started moving from print newspapers to websites, the economics of news changed.
This has been a double-edged sword – social media and other internet services give news outlets ways to reach new audiences, but they also create a whole new environment where people can get news easily from a range of sources.
Breaking the link between publishers and readers has made it harder for the news industry to adapt financially. Print circulations have been in steady decline.
New business models have sprung up – from those who sell subscriptions to paywalled apps and websites, to those who make their journalism available for free, paid for by advertising and donations from loyal readers.
For many people, Facebook is one of the places they find news.
While the amount of news on Facebook is small as a proportion of the content seen overall — less than 4% of what people see in their feed are posts with links to news articles — it undoubtedly plays a significant role in the distribution of journalism.
That’s why Facebook has been working with news organisations around the world for many years to figure out how it can best support the industry for the long term.
Facebook News, which launches in the UK on Tuesday, is a result of those conversations. This is a big shift in Facebook’s approach to journalism — a dedicated place within the Facebook app featuring news from national outlets including The Telegraph Media Group, The Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail Group, Sky News, Channel 4 News, The Economist, The Mirror, The Independent, hundreds of local news sites, and lifestyle ones including GQ, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue and many more.
With Facebook News you will see the top headlines and stories of the day next to news personalised to your interests.
During major news cycles, Facebook News will provide timely news digests, highlighting original and authoritative reporting. It will also give you more control over the stories you see in the app, and the ability to explore news on a wide range of topics. News articles shared by your family, friends or pages you follow will continue to appear in your main feed as normal.
Of course, this speaks to a wider debate about how exactly we should define social media companies such as Facebook. It is neither a publisher — at least not in the traditional sense – nor is it a utility.
There is no editor dictating the front page headline millions will read. Instead there are billions of “front pages,” each personalised to our individual tastes and preferences, and consisting of content created and shared by users themselves.
But Facebook is not passive either. It can and does remove harmful content from its platform, and people too — as it did recently when suspending President Trump — and where content is considered borderline or misinformation, it reduces its distribution.
The reality is Facebook and other social platforms are something entirely new — and should be regulated as such.
We believe that supporting journalism through new products like Facebook News is more likely to succeed in the long run than other potential forms of support.
If publishers were paid every time they posted an article, or every time someone clicked on one, it would incentivise clickbait, sensationalism and volume over high quality journalism. It would also favour bigger publishers with the resources to pump out masses of stories.
Likewise, requiring technology companies to subsidise media companies would risk skewing financial support to large corporations at the expense of the small local news providers who need help the most.
We expect to roll out Facebook News in Germany and France this year, and we hope to collaborate with publishers and experiment with various new product models in other countries where the regulatory landscape allows.
It won’t solve every issue news publishers face or resolve all the tensions social media has created for the news industry. But it should create more value for publishers, and in doing so, help to sustain great national and local journalism.
