"Today In" Facebook New Feature

Facebook proclaimed a replacement experiment in native news on weekday with "Today In."

The feature, that brings along native news, updates and events, are often found within the menu on Facebook's mobile app in six cities: New Orleans; capital of Arkansas, Arkansas; Billings, Montana; Peoria, Illinois; Olympia, Washington; and Binghamton, New York.

Image via Facebook

It's associate giving almost like one thing Google introduced last year with "Community Updates."

Facebook's overtures toward operating with native news began last year with the Facebook Journalism Project, that Poynter is an element of.

That work enclosed coaching native journalists in best practices for Facebook and a couple of product aimed toward higher serving to folks discover native news. And as my colleague Ren LaForme and that i reported last year, Facebook teams were a vital tool for newsrooms covering the cyclone.

So what may native news organizations get out of this latest experiment?

Traffic, maybe, Kurt Wagner writes for rearrange.

It’s attainable that being a part of a separate, native section of the app can facilitate drive additional traffic back to publishers’ stories and websites wherever they'll build cash through advertising, however there's no means for publishers to create cash off the new native section at launch.

Even generating that additional traffic can rely on whether or not or not Facebook users frequent the new section.

Meanwhile, there is real anxiety regarding another experiment Facebook conducted last year in six completely different countries by taking the particular news out of the newsfeed. the corporate told Digiday's Lucia Moses that "there is not any current commit to roll this out on the far side these take a look at countries or to charge pages on Facebook to acquire all their distribution in News Feed or Explore.”

Still, at the start of the year, GroundSource's Simmon Galperin wrote on Medium that it is time to organize for that chance.