Facebook Has Started Looking To Put News Back On Its Friends List
A new article on Forbes reports that Facebook has once again begun to send friend requests to entities within the news business, but you wouldn't blame journalists for ignoring them - or even for deleting the social network altogether.
The social network just signed a sweeping deal with News Corp to add its Australian properties to its Facebook News feature. The following day, we got an announcement about a planned new platform for independent writers. The vehicle will allow them to sign up paying readers for subscriptions. But let's face it, Facebook has a distinct history of botched experiments in journalism - and it doesn't always act in the best of faith where journalists are concerned either.
The deal with News Corp spans three years and comes on the back of Facebook's efforts to stave off digital-platforms legislation in Australia. The alternative was paying government-registered news publishers. That prospect resulted in the recent, clumsy ban on sharing news stories. News Corp's Australian sites will now get paid for appearing in Facebook News.
Facebook now also wants to host the work of self-employed writers - and that could be interpreted as a response to platforms like Patreon and Substack. Facebook is trying to tempt writers by promising features, including:
This isn't the first time Facebook has invited publishers to jump on new features or trends, that in the past, didn't live up to the hype. The "social reader" apps it promoted back in 2011 gave a few sites a short boost in traffic that fell off a cliff after the platform changed its News Feed. Then, Facebook urged sites to invest massively in video, and many obliged, firing writers to free up budgets for their pivots to video. But the touted traffic never materialized. Meanwhile, Facebook also has a dodgy history of providing publishers with inaccurate information about audiences.
Local and smaller publishers seem especially unlikely to profit from Facebook's newest promises. Damon Kiesow is a journalism professor and a chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism:
The social network just signed a sweeping deal with News Corp to add its Australian properties to its Facebook News feature. The following day, we got an announcement about a planned new platform for independent writers. The vehicle will allow them to sign up paying readers for subscriptions. But let's face it, Facebook has a distinct history of botched experiments in journalism - and it doesn't always act in the best of faith where journalists are concerned either.
The deal with News Corp spans three years and comes on the back of Facebook's efforts to stave off digital-platforms legislation in Australia. The alternative was paying government-registered news publishers. That prospect resulted in the recent, clumsy ban on sharing news stories. News Corp's Australian sites will now get paid for appearing in Facebook News.
Facebook now also wants to host the work of self-employed writers - and that could be interpreted as a response to platforms like Patreon and Substack. Facebook is trying to tempt writers by promising features, including:
| "Monetization tools to build successful individual websites and businesses, starting with subscriptions." |
Local and smaller publishers seem especially unlikely to profit from Facebook's newest promises. Damon Kiesow is a journalism professor and a chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism:
| "Whether or not smaller publishers benefit in the short or long-term is as always to be decided, but doubtful, it should be budgeted as a marketing expense, and any revenues received should be treated as a windfall, not a dependable new source of income. They tend to have their friends that they go to first, and foes that they desperately have to win over. For everybody else, It's definitely been a don't-call-us, we'll-call-you situation... with all of the tech platforms." |
