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Facebook brings breaking news with FB Newswire

• Egon Kilin
• April 28th, 2014

Facebook announced FB Newswire this Thursday, a page containing carefully selected news and certified stories, from all across the social network’s platform. FB Newswire is the result of Facebook’s partnership with the news agency, Storyful, that aggregates all shared news content. Storyful has a team of journalists verifying news as they’re shared all over social media. Due to this new partnership, the news agency has to find all popular news and stories shared on Facebook. Then, the journalists will have to verify the news before releasing their contents on FB Newswire.

“It’s going to be journalists every step of the way deciding what is of value, what should we verify, and going off and starting what is a very rigorous process at Storyful [to verify the story],” said Aine Kerr, managing editor at Storyful.

Facebook’s news page will include all sorts of stories, from all around the world, of course, there will be stories in other languages too, not only in English. And, not every story will be published on FB Newswire, the news will be carefully selected so that only those of quality will appear on the news page. If you want to subscribe to FB Newswire, all you have to do is Like the page, and stories from around the world will appear on your News Feed (Facebok’s attempt to give its users a newspaper experience).

As expected from Facebook, this move is also competitive. The social network is definitely aiming for the top spot in the breaking news territory. The main competitor is Twitter, as both networks want to be the news consumers’ first choice. Facebook has certainly improved in this point on view, mostly over the past year, allowing publications to embed posts inside the stories, also adding trending topics feature news to News Feed.

As always, the main concern is that FB Newswire is just another way to sell adds. Facebook reported its income from adds in 2014 is no less than $2.27 billion. As internet advertizing is 21% of all advertizing, apart from ruling the breaking news realm, Facebook might fill the news platform with adds, which may or may not upset news consumers worldwide.