With Facebook’s news tab, only some will get paid
Social media giant plans to pay about a quarter of news organizations whose content will be featured
Facebook Inc. is planning to pay only a minority of publishers whose headlines will be featured in its coming news section, according to people familiar with the matter.
The specialized news section—which will appear on the toolbar at the bottom of Facebook’s mobile app—is set to launch as early as the end of October and will include links to stories from about 200 publications, the people said.
A person familiar with the matter said Facebook had never planned to pay all the news outlets whose content it would link to in its news section. The plan is similar to what Facebook has done with its Watch section, which includes videos not paid for by Facebook, the person said. Taking into account companies that own multiple publications, Facebook will pay fees to about one-quarter of the organizations that will be involved at launch, the person said.
Facebook is still negotiating with several big publishers, and in most cases talks have centered around how much of their reporting publishers would allow to be posted on the Facebook tab, the people familiar with the matter said. Facebook wants news organizations to allow access to all their stories for possible inclusion in the news tab, but some outlets have pushed for only allowing limited access.
The outlets in talks with Facebook include Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones & Co., the Washington Post, the New York Times, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, HuffPost and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the people said.
The licensing fees Facebook is offering range as high as $3 million a year for national news outlets to several hundred thousand dollars for regional publications, they said. The deals would be for three years.
Facebook plans to expand the number of publishers included in the program as the product develops, the people said. The feed will become more customizable and individually targeted, and will eventually include links from Facebook’s local-news project “Today In.”
The company’s move to pay for news comes as the big tech platforms have come under growing legal and regulatory scrutiny. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has resisted paying publishers but recently announced changes to how it ranks stories on its news page to better promote original content, another longrunning complaint from publishers.
News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti have both called on Facebook and Google to pay organizations that provide quality news. News Corp is the Journal’s parent company.
Facebook will highlight only publishers that rated above a certain level of trustworthiness in surveys the company conducted among its users last year. But the company, which has been accused of bias by conservatives in the past, has been mindful to include a diversity of viewpoints among the outlets that will be featured, one person said.
For example, while stories from Infowars won’t be included, stories from Breitbart might appear, this person said.
“We’ve been working closely with news organizations to get this right by emphasizing original reporting and making it much easier to find the most relevant news on Facebook,” said Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships.
Headlines appearing in Facebook’s news section will be chosen in some cases by a team of editors and in others by the company’s algorithm, people familiar with the matter said. The “Top News” section, which will feature about 10 headlines and story summaries, will be entirely curated by human editors.
News in subsections, such as sports or entertainment, and a “suggested for you” section, will be selected by algorithm. The feed won’t include any advertising and all stories will direct readers to the publishers’ own websites, the people said.
Facebook’s curators will use a detailed list of criteria for which stories to highlight, including promoting outlets that were the first to report the news, the people said. Stories with named sources might also be given priority to those that rely on anonymous sources.
Facebook is looking to expand its team of curators to about 25 people, with some based in London, to work under Anne Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize winner who joined Facebook in 2015 after stints at the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe, the people said.