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October 25, 2019 01:20 am

Facebook Is Launching a News Section -- and Will Pay Some Publishers Millions

Facebook is planning to launch its news section on Friday, "which will give users a way to scan headlines and read some news stories -- and which will give some publishers, like News Corp, millions of dollars a year for making their journalism available to Facebook," reports Recode. From the report: News Corp CEO Robert Thomson and his boss, News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, have been insisting that Facebook and other tech platforms should pay them for access to their work. Now Zuckerberg is giving them what they want. It's a remarkable turnaround for Zuckerberg, who as recently as May 2018 said he had no interest in paying publishers for the right to show their stories. Facebook will roll out its news section Friday as an "alpha" launch, available to a couple hundred thousand U.S. users; it won't get a wider release for a few months. Facebook users who do get it will see a new icon at the bottom of their mobile app alongside other initiatives like its Marketplace classified sales section and its Facebook Watch video section. Users who click on the icon will see headlines for a handful of top stories, selected by Facebook editors -- from partners like the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by News Corp), Business Insider, and BuzzFeed -- and a personalized selection of headlines selected by Facebook's algorithmic software. Clicking on those headlines will send users to the publishers' own sites, where Facebook users can read the entire story for free. And while sites with subscription-based business models will have to let Facebook users see individual articles without paying, they'll be able to keep their paywalls mostly intact: If you click on a Wall Street Journal article via Facebook's news section, you'll be able to read that one story, but if you click on a subsequent WSJ piece, you'll be asked to pay up. Some deals have yet to be finalized, such as deals with the Washington Post and the New York Times, for instance, but sources say Facebook expects to have them by the time the program rolls out widely. "Facebook will pay some of its news partners as much as $3 million a year for three-year deals but doesn't intend to pay all of the publishers in the program," reports Recode. "Publishers who don't get paid will have to be content having Facebook send them traffic and potential subscribers."

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