Facebook is building a dedicated news tab for publishers

Facebook is moving ahead with plans to create a dedicated news section, and it reportedly is offering to pay publishers millions of dollars to participate.

The social network has been meeting with publishers and hiring to support the section and still plans to roll it out later this year, Business Insider has reported.

According to a publisher source, Mark Zuckerberg believes a news tab could draw a whopping 15% of Facebook users.

Facebook has made the section enticing but is likely to face skepticism from publishers that have been burned by the platform's frequent strategy changes.

Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Facebook is moving ahead with plans to create a dedicated news section, and The Wall Street Journal reported that it is dangling “millions” in front of publishers to participate.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year floated the idea of creating a place for users who want more news. The tech giant has since begun talking to publishers and hiring to support it.

Facebook execs have been holding one-on-one meetings to get feedback on the news tab and other products from publishers that have shown interest in being early to try new Facebook products in the past. The goal is to roll out the tab by the end of the year. The discussions are being led by Shelley Venus and Anne Kornblut, two Facebook executives who have news backgrounds and are respected in the news industry.

Facebook is also advertising on LinkedIn for a member of its media-partnerships team — which works on products like Facebook Watch, the video section that includes news shows from ABC News and Univision in addition to entertainment shows — and the forthcoming news tab. The posting says the person will focus on “news content acquisition efforts and general deal flow” in media partnerships, be “responsible for the end-to-end negotiations with partners,” and work to “drive meaningful value to media partners.”

'A better environment for news'

Facebook doesn't have a product it's showing around, but at this point the section is expected to feature publishers' links rather than videos or original content that they would have to make exclusively for the section, which would make it easier to get publishers to participate. Facebook execs have emphasized that the tab won't replace the news that's in the feed, even though it has experimented with such an idea in the past.

“This will be a better environment for news,” said Jeff Jarvis, a City University of New York journalism professor who's familiar with the plan.

Other ways the tab will appeal to publishers are that it's also likely to offer some level of personalization and some light oversight by an editorial team, as well as involve payments to publishers, according to people familiar with Facebook's thinking.

A clearer picture of how Facebook is thinking about payments has started to emerge. According to the Journal, Facebook reps told news executives they would pay as much as $3 million a year to license headlines and previews of articles from news outlets, though.

Based on conversations with Facebook, some publishers expect the platform to share ad revenue from their stories and let them keep all associated subscription revenue, in line with Facebook's past practice. That could help get prestigious, subscription-driven publishers like The New York Times and The Washington Post on board.

Facebook sent a team of 10 to a meeting with ABC News and shared a detailed roadmap for the product, indicating a high level of deliberation, said Colby Smith, the senior vice president of content and partnerships for ABC News. Facebook execs asked a lot of questions suggesting they wanted the section to have human involvement, not just be algorithm-driven, he said.

“They definitely want another crack at being a meaningful business partner for publishers,” Smith said.

Another news executive who's been briefed on the plan said that “they seem open-eyed about the challenges: not just the content but what the news is, how you balance hard news and human-interest stories in the same way publishers do.”

A news-only tab could make a lot of sense

On the surface, it makes sense to have a separate tab for news, because while Facebook has cut the amount of news it sends through its News Feed, news still forms part of the conversation ecosystem that Facebook wants to be part of. Facebook has over the years changed strategies to promote and pay for news, and it has said it wants to elevate quality news on the platform but has struggled with how to judge quality.

Meanwhile, right around the time Zuckerberg floated the news-tab idea, the rival platform Apple News launched a subscription program that shares revenue with publishers.

A news tab featuring established news outlets could help Facebook defend against criticism of its problems with misinformation and fake news spreading on the platform and accusations of ideological bias, from both the left and the right, in the news it promotes in the feed.

So will Facebook get the publishers it needs to participate, when publishers feel as if they've been burned by its multiple strategy changes？

Facebook believes it can create a huge audience just for news

One big question is whether Facebook can get a meaningful audience to the section in the first place after it struggled to create a strong viewing habit with the Watch section. But an exec who's familiar with the plans said Zuckerberg believes a news tab could draw 15% of Facebook users, which could be huge.

A lot of publishers are strapped for revenue and would welcome any funding as Facebook and Google eat up most of the digital-ad pie. Publishers with an ad-supported model that still lean heavily on social platforms for awareness seem more likely to benefit from a news tab.

There are still many questions though. Most important: Will Facebook fully commit to the tab？ There are signs that this is real, but veterans have seen other initiatives come and go as the company's interests and priorities change.

Then there are more nitty-gritty questions around things like how much control publishers will have over which of their stories get seen. Subscription publishers will want to know whether Facebook will prefer free over paywalled content. And how will Facebook treat breaking news？

The makeup of publishers in the tab is a big concern. A publication like The Post might be glad to share a tab with the likes of The Wall Street Journal, but what about Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller？ Facebook in the past has put the burden on users to answer the question of what “quality news” is, and this time it has been putting the question to publishers.

A publisher whose company has been briefed on the news tab said they worried that Facebook would give space to heavily ideological publishers in an attempt to be balanced.

“If you decide fairness has to be a quantity game,” the publisher said, “you end up with a false equivalency.”