United Kingdom: Facebook is expanding local news presence on its platform

Facebook announced that it will give local media a greater presence in its Facebook news ecosystem, which It was launched at the end of 2019 on a trial basis in the US, So what A few months ago it spread to the UK.

Facebook news is Content aggregator from reliable information sources that can be viewed on a tab within the mobile application. It exclusively displays professional news, which in this way is differentiated from the news feed, Or from the series of posts of all kinds that appear on the Facebook homepage.

Assembler It started in the United States with media outlets such as Janet Newspapers (USA Today), News Corp (The Wall Street Journal and New York Post), Los Angeles Times, Condé Nast (The New Yorker, Vanity Fair), NBC, Bloomberg, and others..

These newspapers receive a variable economic amount for reprinting the contents of this section. However, the presence of local media was scarce. In the past year, the service in the US was expanded to give more space specifically for Proximate Media.

In the UK since the beginning of the year

At the start of this year, Facebook News, after its testing phase in the US, began expanding and landing in the UK. However, the information ecosystem in the UK is not the same as the one in the US, and the local media have more insight into the lives of the citizens.

To counterbalance this, Facebook announced yesterday, a few months after launching Facebook News in the UK, ‘New investment in the UK news ecosystem with the creation of a local news section on Facebook News.

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The goal is: “To help hundreds of publishers attract additional audiences to their sites and connect people to the news that interests them the most.”

This new post, they add from the social network, “It would also make it easier for people to find a greater mix of local and national reports that interest them.”

The “Add Site” function allows you to customize your feed

Until yesterday, Facebook users were from The UK received local news but only from publishers who were connected to them on Facebook. With the new Local section, they can choose to receive news from publishers in towns and cities in which they live or are interested in using the Add a Location feature.

People will also receive local news based on the location they have specified on their Facebook profile.

Sarah Brown, director of Facebook News Partnerships for Northern Europe, commented yesterday: “Connecting people to local news has never been more important, and many people have become dependent on local media for the most up-to-date information during the pandemic.”

With this new feature on Facebook News, “We want to increase traffic to local sites, and help publishers reach new audiences. For people on Facebook, they can now see the local news that interests them as well as the biggest national stories of the day. “

Facebook also recently announced this Ampleaba Community News Project
For another year. The annual training fund of £ 2.25m in partnership with the National Council for Training of Journalists (NCTJ) trains reporters in 80 local newsrooms across the UK.

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There is no news, at the moment, of Facebook’s intentions to begin rolling out the service to Spanish-speaking countries.

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