Facebook is considering jumping into news curation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday in a video posted on the company’s platform.
Such a service would be fused into Facebook’s platform and would rely on third-party publishers to provide the content, Zuckerberg told Mathias Döpfner, CEO of German publisher Axel Springer. Facebook significantly altered its newsfeed in 2018 to downplay the existence of news in people’s feeds.
“We have decided that there really is an opportunity to do something like that with news as well,” he told Döpfner, adding that Facebook’s second attempt at distributing news would be different as the company would consult with publishers beforehand. (RELATED: Facebook Fundamentally Changes Its News Feed)
“I think there’s a real opportunity within a separate news surface to have better monetization for publishers,” Zuckerberg said. “Facebook could potentially have a direct relationship with publishers in order to make sure that their content is available if it’s really high-quality content.”
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Critics argue that Facebook, Twitter, and other major social media platforms have all-but destroyed the news industry. Digital outlets are struggling to keep up in a world where their content is given away for free, according to Eric Schiffer, the CEO of Patriarch Equity, which focuses on pre-IPO startups in Silicon Valley.
“Facebook and some of the other big tech agitators have acted like rat poison for journalist jobs. When you can get your news for free from a platform, it decimates the firms that are putting out high quality reporting,” Schiffer told The Daily Caller News Foundation in January. His comments came shortly after BuzzFeed, Yahoo, and other publishers laid off roughly 1,000 employees due in part to the new digital world.
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