Facebook Unveils Journalists Site

Newsrooms and journalists have long used Facebook as a platform that shares and publishes content. However, the social media company based in Menlo Park, California now wants to be a source of news as well.

Facebook launched late last week FB Newswire, a new featured that is aimed at making the site a better resource in real time for newsrooms and journalists.

FB Newswire aggregates content that is newsworthy from notable organizations or people in a format making it easy to share and embed into news media.

This new feature will include original videos, photos as well as status updates to be shared on both the Facebook page of FB Newswire and Twitter.

It is a bit ironic that a rival social media site is being used by Facebook to publish its own new content. Twitter Inc however, has been long used by as a newswire by journalists and new FB Newswire is an effort by the social media site Facebook to challenge Twitter as a news source in real-time while tacitly letting it be known that Twitter is better setup for releasing breaking news.

If that was not ironic enough, Twitter has also just completed the redesign of profile pages that look much more similar to Facebook.

FB Newswire is run by Storyful, a project covering social news launched back in April of 2010 by Mark Little a journalist from Ireland that was acquired by News Corp in December for over $25 million.

Facebook news and globe media director Andy Mitchell said the social media giant was pleased to entered into this new business with a partner that has a proven track record for understanding the social web potential as a resource for media and with the tools that are needed by the newsrooms to utilize it.

Facebook has put a great deal of effort into constructing partnerships with different media organizations. As well as licensing content to media groups and making a community for journalists, the social media site uses its feature of Trending Topics to promote its content and its News Feed to highlight different articles.

Facebook has said that traffic to different media sites originally from Facebook increased fourfold in 2013.

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Deborah Campbell

Deborah Campbell grew up on a steady diet of fantasy stories, 19th century poetry and Greek mythology. It’s no wonder she turned into such a hopeless romantic. She has always had a knack for writing, but she has yet to publish any best-seller yet. At the beginning of 2013 she decided to try something a little different: she started working for a web design firm, as a creative artist. That’s where she discovered her second calling. Although seemingly opposite, fantasy and technology are Deborah’s two main passions. She is now part of the argyllfreepress.com team, for which she creates detailed tutorials & reviews for some of the world’s most exciting gadgets. She also tries to squeeze a verse or two in her reviews from time to time.