Facebook and the news industry will team up again as the social network plans to launch a new News tab.
Facebook announced Friday the first look at Facebook News, which will be a new section of the app dedicated to news content. Facebook users will have the ability to click the tab where they can find news articles from outlets partnering with Facebook.
The new tab will have the following:
- Today’s stories, which will focus on news of the day.
- Personalized news stories based on your interest.
- Different topics to scroll, like entertainment, sports and health.
- Subscriptions that you can link to your Facebook account.
- Controls to hide articles and certain topics.
Facebook news will partner with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Axios, among others, at launch. Some news outlets will be paid for their content, while others, like Breitbart, will not be paid as a partner.
“Some stories will be chosen by a team of professional journalists, while others will be tailored to readers’ interests over time using Facebook’s machine-learning technology,” according to The New York Times.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Axios in an interview that the new Facebook News tab will be Facebook’s way to “do a better job of supporting journalism.”
Zuckerberg said he knows Facebook became disruptive of the news industry. So he wants to make sure the social network can correct the mistakes.
“We get that the internet has been very disruptive to the news industry,” Zuckerberg said. “Certainly, we are one of the services that is a part of that trend. So I take our responsibility as part of this very seriously.”
“This is an important moment in our relationship with the news industry and with journalism,” he added. “The values here are things that we felt for a long time. It’s taken a while to figure out the right way to implement this.”
Facebook will launch to a test group of users before having a widespread rollout, according to The Verge.