6 Things you Need to Know about Facebook Newswire

FBNewswireLast week, Facebook announced the launch of FB Newswire, a new content resource for journalists. Need the down and dirty? Here are the answers to six key questions about this new offering from the social giant.

  1. What is it? Facebook Newswire is powered by Storyful, a website that discovers, verifies and packages social content from newsrooms to make it easier for journalists to find verified newsworthy stories, quickly. The site aggregates newsworthy content shared publicly by individuals and organizations across the world – including original photos, videos and status updates.
  2. Can you search it? Not right now. You can do a typical browser search (Ctrl F) to find keywords within the current loaded  content, but there is no way to search just the page.
  3. Is there contact information for sources? Sort of. You can get in touch with the sources via their Facebook pages. This is very forward-thinking, assuming that someday people and organizations will be checking their Facebook messages as much as their email or voicemails. While this very well could be the situation in the next few years, right now journalists will feel inhibited by the lack of source information on FB Newswire.
  4. Does it have all of the information a journalist needs? While the site touts that it is will make it easier for journalists and newsrooms to, “find, share and embed newsworthy content in the media they produce,” (FB Newsroom press release) a true news organization will use the newsroom for ideas, but it’s not a current end-all. The newsroom isn’t offering links to press releases or other sources, and it’s currently following very strict formatting guidelines that gloss over key information.
  5. How can I get FB Newswire to pick up my client’s post? A high-quality  photo and genuinely newsworthy topics are two must-haves. To get on Storyful’s radar, the post will need a lot of shares, comments and views. This means knowing your audience and following content best-practices.  It’s not an exact science, and we’ll all be learning more as FB Newswire continues to grow.
  6. What’s next? Content is king, and the newsroom is sorely lacking in providing enough content to be truly helpful to journalists. Yes, it’s a place for quick news bites, but it’s not offering enough access to the full story. This could be remedied to an extent if the search function within the page were better. Then, as intended,  it would  help journalists work quickly to identify shareable content already on Facebook.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and findings about this new offering from Facebook. What have you seen so far?

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