The Facebook CEO floats a “news tab to surface more high quality news,” and says he’s willing to write checks to support it.
More than a year after announcing that Facebook would feature less news, Mark Zuckerberg says he has a new idea: He wants to create a new section of his social network that would be devoted to “high quality news”, and may pay publishers that share their stuff there.
Zuckerberg floated the idea in a conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, which Facebook has recorded and posted here.
“We talked about the role quality journalism plays in building informed communities and the principles Facebook should use for building a news tab to surface more high quality news, including the business model and ecosystem to support it,” Zuckerberg writes in the introduction to the chat.
In his discussion with Döpfner, Zuckerberg talks about building a feature so that Facebook “users who want more news content can do that,” and says his company could “potentially have a direct relationship with publishers to make sure that their content is available, if it’s really high quality content.”
That is: Zuckerberg is talking about paying publishers some kind of license fee.
“That’s definitely something that I think we should be thinking about here, because the relationship between us and publishers is different in a surface where we’re showing the content on the basis of us believing that it’s high-quality, trustworthy content,” Zuckerberg told Döpfner.
That’s a major pivot for Facebook, which has tried several different strategies to work with news publishers, but with a few exceptions hasn’t paid them directly for their content. Instead, the company has tried to entice publishers to share their stuff on Facebook by rewarding them with eyeballs, or a share of advertising dollars.
Zuckerberg’s video is first public appearance of an idea Facebook executives have been discussing and tinkering with for months. Both outgoing product boss Chris Cox and Campbell Brown, the company’s head of news partnerships, had championed the project, and Facebook has tested out the idea of a dedicated news internally.
The discussion also comes as Zuckerberg is making a public relations and lobbying push in Europe and the U.S.. Over the weekend, in an op-ed he published in the Washington Post, Zuckerberg asked world leaders to help create new regulations for Facebook and other internet companies.
from Recode - All https://ift.tt/2HQzebH
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