Facebook is Hiring Journalists for Its Coming Dedicated News Section

Social Media Today is reporting that Facebook’s future dedicated news tab might seem a little like a trip into the past for the social network, with the new details revealed sounding eerily similar to the Trending News feature that Facebook ditched last year.

Right now, Facebook is advertising for journalists to curate the dedicated news section on its website. The New York Times say that Facebook are looking to recruit a whole team of journalists:

The recruitment ad specifies that this project is going to be about credible content. With 43% of US adults currently getting part of their news content from the platform, Facebook’s ambition here is one of becoming known as a curator of trusted news sources.

In and interview last April with Mathias Döpfner, who’s the CEO of German publishing house Axel Springer, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his plan for the news tab, and he spoke of ‘high quality, trusted sources.’

The idea seems to be to find news and have journalists curate it to maintain a trustworthy level of quality. The aim will be to avoid the same accusations of bias, which happened with the Trending News section in the past. Although there is an element of history repeating here, Facebook may have learned lessons from the past and having in-house journalists handle the fresh News Tab, rather than contracted curators, might be a sign of that.

It’s certainly not a bad start that, according to The Information Facebook have hired Anne Kornblut – Pulitzer winner and former editor of The Washington Post – to help lead efforts to hire editors:

"Facebook plans to use algorithms to curate most of the stories in the forthcoming news tab, which is slated to debut before the end of the year. Human editors will select breaking and “top” news stories."

So, what will this News section will look like? Well, Facebook Watch could come into play. Zuckerberg has hinted in the past of a new Facebook Watch- like feature – but for news:

"One of the things that's really worked over the last year or two is we've launched [Facebook Watch] for video, where people who weren't getting all the video they wanted in News Feed could go to a place that's a dedicated space to get video. Because that has started to really grow quickly, we've decided that there really is an opportunity to do something like that with news as well."

It could be that we’re going to see a whole new tab within the app for news, just as with Facebook Watch. Given the scope and budget of the news project, it’s not out of the question.

One thing is for certain, whatever Facebook is planning, they’re not going to be leaving it entirely to the algorithms to edit. A move echoed recently by Twitter.

Customizable timelines that are easy to access? We’re thinking about ways to do this! One idea we had is for you to be able to swipe to your lists from home. If you're in the test tell us what you think! pic.twitter.com/g5WMaNZ57N

— Twitter (@Twitter) 25 June 2019

Twitter's new topic streams will also be human-curated. There seems to be a widespread move away from algorithm dependence when it comes to the important business of making sure that bias doesn’t creep into a system, and at even worse, that outright lies don’t appear as credible news.

I think it says a lot that Facebook is learning lessons from the past and ditching algorithmic curation of news. The fact other platforms are doing it too speaks volumes. Are we seeing the limit of what algorithms are capable of here?