Over the course of its 15-year history, Facebook Inc has variously ignored news organizations while eating their advertising revenue, courted them for video projects it subsequently abandoned and then largely cut their stories out of its newsfeeds.
Now it plans to pay them for news headlines — reportedly millions of dollars in some cases.
Enter the “News Tab,” a new section in the Facebook mobile app that is to display headlines — and nothing else — from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, National Broadcasting Co, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Breitbart, a conservative news outlet that has been accused of running racist stories, is also to be part of the News Tab, as would local stories from several of the largest US cities.
Headlines from smaller towns are on their way, Facebook said.
Tapping on those headlines will take you directly to publisher Web sites or apps, if you have any installed, which is one thing publishers have been requesting from Facebook’s news efforts for years.
It is potentially a big step for a platform that has long struggled with stamping out misinformation and making nice with struggling purveyors of news, but media watchers remain skeptical that Facebook is really committed to helping sustain the news industry.
Facebook declined to detail who is getting paid and how much, saying only that it would be paying “a range of publishers for access to all of their content.”
Just last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he was not sure it “makes sense” to pay news outlets for their material.
However, now, as Zuckerberg told the Associated Press in an interview, “there’s an opportunity to set up new long-term, stable financial relationships with publishers.”
The AP is not participating in the initiative.
News executives have long been unhappy about the extent to which digital giants like Facebook make use of their stories — mostly by displaying headlines and short summaries when users post links.
A bill introduced in the US Congress earlier this year would grant an anti-trust exemption to news companies, letting them band together to negotiate payments from the big tech platforms.
“It’s a good direction that they’re willing for the first time to value and pay for news content,” said David Chavern, head of the News Media Alliance, a publisher trade group. “The trouble is that most publishers aren’t included.”
Zuckerberg said that Facebook aims to set up partnerships with a “wide range” of publishers.
“We think that this is an opportunity to build something quite meaningful here,” he said. “We’re going to have journalists curating this; we are really focused on provenance and branding, and where the stories come from.”
At an event on Friday in New York, Zuckerberg was asked why Facebook is not paying all publishers in the news section.
The initial focus was on building a broad set of content and figuring how to compensate publishers with paywalls, he said.
The next step would be to add local and international sources to the tab, he added.
Facebook last year killed its most recent effort to curate news, the ill-fated “Trending” topics. Conservatives complained about political bias, leading Facebook to fire its human editors and automate the section until it began recycling false stories, after which the social media giant shut it down entirely.
However, what happens when the sprawling social network plays news editor?
An approach that sends people news based on what they have liked before could over time elevate stories with greater “emotional resonance” over news that “allows public discourse to take place,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It deepens my concern that they’ll be applying Facebook logic to news judgement,” he added.
The social network has again come under criticism for its news judgement.
Last month, it removed a fact-check from “Science Feedback” that called out an anti-abortion activist’s video for claiming that abortion is never medically necessary.
US Republican senators had complained about the fact check.
Asked at the event on Friday why Breitbart was included in the News Tab, Zuckerberg said that the company wants a “breadth of content.”
A small team of “seasoned” journalists it employs are to choose the headlines for the “Today’s Story” section of the tab, designed to “catch you up” on the day’s news, Facebook said.
The rest of the news section is to be populated with stories algorithmically based on users’ interests, it said.
That sounds similar to the approach taken by Apple News, a free iPhone app.
However, Apple Inc’s effort to contract with news organizations has been slow to take off. Apple News Plus, a US $10 per month paid version, remains primarily a hub for magazines; other news publishers have largely sat it out.
Apple’s service reportedly offered publishers only half the revenue it pulled in from subscriptions, divided according to how popular publishers were with readers.
Zuckerberg said that he hopes to have 20 to 30 million people in the US using the News Tab over a few years.
EXPECTATIONS: The firm, which is on track to outpace global foundry industry revenue growth, said it expects constrained advanced process capacity amid stronger AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday increased its projected revenue growth for this year to above 25 percent, as stronger-than-expected demand for premium smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI) devices are to drive greater utilization of cutting-edge 3-nanometer and 5-nanometer chips. In April TSMC estimated 21 to 24 percent annual growth. The firm’s revenue growth is on track to greatly outpace the global foundry industry, which is expected to rise about 10 percent this year. “Over the past three months, we have observed stronger AI and high-end smartphone demand from our customers, which is to boost the overall capacity utilization for our leading-edge
INVESTMENT: The company’s planned complex in Texas would be the first 12-inch silicon wafer fab built in the US in more than 20 years, a GlobalWafers official said GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said it secured up to US$400 million in direct funding from the US Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act for the construction of two new advanced fabs in the US. Its subsidiaries GlobalWafers America and MEMC LLC are to build a 12-inch silicon wafer fab in Sherman, Texas, and another one in Missouri to produce silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers used to make leading-edge chips. “With the support of the [US President Joe] Biden Administration, we are honored to be bringing to American shores the world’s most cutting-edge 12-inch semiconductor
Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (力積電) yesterday said that net losses ballooned to NT$1.96 billion (US$60.1 million) in the second quarter, as heavy manufacturing costs from a new fab outweighed the improvement in customer demand and factory utilization. That compared with losses of NT$439 million in the first quarter. The company posted a net profit of NT$617 million a year earlier. Gross margin plummeted to 5.3 percent last quarter, from 15.4 percent in the previous quarter and 16.8 percent in the same period last year. It was the weakest since the fourth quarter of last year. The chipmaker blamed heavy depreciation and higher manufacturing
Nikon Corp is fielding strong demand for its legacy chipmaking machines in China, which is mobilizing resources to build its own semiconductor supply chain. Inquiries for the Japanese precision maker’s lithography tools have surged in China, Nikon president Muneaki Tokunari said. The company is set to revamp a lithography machine geared for decades-old manufacturing processes. Its NSR-2205iL1, launching this summer, would serve the market for mature chip technology and Nikon expects to sell more than 10 units of the machine annually, said Tokunari, who is also chief operating officer and chief financial officer. New companies are sprouting up in China to make