Facebook cozies up to journalists with FB Newswire
The service will be one part news aggregator and one part news source for journalists.
Facebook on Thursday announced FB Newswire, a new service available now that aggregates the latest news from around the world, and incorporates verification to help journalists know that a particular story is accurate and can be trusted.
In order to bring that verification into the mix, Facebook has partnered with Stoyful, a company that aggregates content from social networks and verifies their accuracy byway of its editorial team. The FB Newswire content will be collected from status updates shared publicly by the social network's users and companies, and include everything from photos to videos to text.
The move is an important one for Facebook as it eyes its own relevancy in the daily news cycle. Twitter has become a destination for both users and journalists to post and find news, leaving Facebook far behind. The world's largest social network recently added a feature that shares what's trending on the service at any given time, and now FB Newswire will attempt to eat Twitter's lunch in news by adding the extra element of verification.
Despite the seeming attempt to take on Twitter in real-time news, Facebook hasn't been able to fully distance itself from the competing social network: FB Newswire will provide updates through its very own Twitter account.
Now that the real-time-news war is on, Facebook is making a strong push for journalists to use FB Newswire. The company says that last year, referral traffic from Facebook to media sites grew over four times the traffic referred in the prior year. It's not clear, however, exactly how much traffic was sent to media sites.
CNET has contacted Facebook for additional comment on FB Newswire. We will update this story when we have more information.
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