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Journalism of Courage
Facebook announced a new initiative, called the “The Journalism Project” in an attempt to maintain closer ties with media houses and publishers. As part of the effort, the social networking giant will collaborate with news organisations on product development, help train journalists on how to use Facebook as a reporting tool and work on efforts to promote news literacy.
The Facebook Journalism Project will comprise of three elements: collaborative development of news products, education for journalists and tools for public. Collaborative development of news products will include new storytelling formats. “We want to work with partners to evolve our current formats — Live, 360, Instant Articles, etc. — to better suit their needs, and work with them on building entirely new ones,” wrote Fidji Simo, Director of Product in a blogpost, which announced the project.
The social networking company will test a new feature in Instant Articles that lets readers see multiple articles at the same time from their favourite news organisations.
Facebook is also looking for more inputs from journalists to support local news. Other initiatives include helping media companies grow their subscription businesses, and hackathons where Facebook engineers collaborate with developers from news organisations in order to identify opportunities and create solutions.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company will work on providing training and tools for journalists, which includes a partnership with Poynter to launch a certificate curriculum for journalists in the months ahead. Facebook is also developing more tools to help journalists use its Live video feature more efficiently to report and discover news as it happens.
In addition, the project aims to launch educational materials for regular users to help them make smart choices about the news they read and promote news literacy. Facebook will work with third-party organisations, which will promote news literacy both on and off its platform to help people understand which source to trust.
“We know that our community values sharing and discussing ideas and news”, wrote Simo, “and as a part of our service, we care a great deal about making sure that a healthy news ecosystem and journalism can thrive.” Facebook is under increasing pressure to stop the spread of “fake news”, especially in the aftermath of the recent US presidential elections. Last month, the social networking giant unveiled its plan to combat “fake news” and “hoaxes” on the site.
In the blog post, Facebook also confirmed that it is continuing to work on its efforts to curb fake news. “We recently announced improvements on our platform to further reduce the spread of news hoaxes — including ways for people to report them more easily and new efforts to disrupt the financial incentives for spammers.”
