What Zuck thinks we need: Newsroom
Ah, Zuck is at it again. Not happy with merely being drilled in a Congress-led enquiry about his doomed digital currency, Libra, he has launched the next prong under the Facebook umbrella that we probably don’t need but will likely just use regardless.
Facebook News is being trialled throughout the USA as a “trusted” source for news and “an essential tool for making good decisions” in a world of fake news content and corruption. One of the main reasons why Facebook is making this change is to separate a user’s News Feed (the posts they see from friends, family and pages they like) from actual news headlines. News reports were getting mixed up between “your friend tagged your other friend in this post”, your elderly relative sharing #BS spam posts, and distracting videos that frankly decrease our productivity.
From the reveal video on the News Room page, the new tab seems to be very similar to the Apple News app. We will be able to subscribe to our favourite publications, search by news topic, and of course the much-loved (!) algorithm will have its fun scarily predicting suggested articles for us.
Facebook have in fact created a curated team of employees to specifically choose the Top Stories of the day with “editorial independence”. The hope is to provide more authentic news material instead, which US people surveyed said they have been missing out on. In fact, Facebook are actually paying a small handful of reputable publishers, such as News Corp, in order to have access to the newspaper’s content. Hopefully a pay raise for the hard-working writers too!
So, when the added tab comes onto our Facebook screens in Australia, expect publications ranging from national titles to community papers like the Leader. Do we need it though? From a journalism standpoint, quite possibly. We read so much of the same news—wouldn’t it be nice to have one collated digital area? Considering that most people already use Facebook and fewer use Apple News (still a huge 90 million people globally!), will we see the demise of Apple’s own app? Perhaps the introduction of Facebook News will tip users over the edge and we will see a return to traditional news reading: newspapers! Remember them?
An interesting take on the new Facebook development comes from the co-founder of Save Journalism Project, Laura Bassett: ‘How can you call Zuckerberg the saviour of journalism when he’s one of the ones that killed it?’ Facebook News isn’t creating any new jobs in the media industry, nor is it going to revive any that have been cut in recent years thanks to the digital sphere exploding.
The thing is though—Facebook News will be hard not to use. As much as many people say they don’t like the platform, few delete it. There is always something that brings people back to the app once they decide to take a break or deactivate it for a short time. Inclusion in friendship groups, staying up to date with news on friends and family, and of course, memes and videos, eventually cause most users to reactivate their accounts. It comes down to #FOMO—plain and simple.