Local news service launching in 6,000 cities

Barbara Ortutay

Associated Press

Published 3:38 PM EDT Sep 12, 2019

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook is trying to coax “news deserts” into bloom with the second major expansion of a tool that exposes people to more local news and information. The social network confessed it still has a lot to learn.

The social media giant said Thursday it is expanding its “Today In” service to 6,000 cities and towns across the USA, from 400 in its previous iteration. Launched in early 2018, the service lets Facebook users opt into news and information from local organizations. Such news can include missing-person alerts, election results, road closures and crime reports.

The tool lives within the Facebook app; turning it on adds updates to a user’s regular news feed. In areas with scant local news, Facebook will add relevant articles from surrounding areas.

The service won’t automatically turn on for people even in the areas it serves, which could limit its reach. Facebook said 1.6 million people have activated Today In. They receive news from about 1,200 publishers every week.

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The service aggregates posts from the official Facebook pages for news organizations, government agencies and community groups such as dog shelters. It uses software filters to weed out objectionable content.

Facebook employs no human editors for Today In, so tweaking its algorithm to find good stories has been a complicated process. Does a road closure matter if it’s 100 miles away? How about a murder?

About 1,800 newspapers have closed in the USA over the past 15 years, according to research from the University of North Carolina. Newsroom employment has declined by 45% as the industry struggles with a broken business model partly caused by the success of companies on the internet, including Facebook.

“There is no silver bullet,” said Campbell Brown, head of global news partnerships at Facebook. “We really want to help publishers address challenges in local markets.”

Brown, a former news anchor and host at NBC and CNN, said local reporting remains the “most important” form of journalism. She said Facebook has a “responsibility” to support journalism.

News is just one part of the Today In feature, which includes posts from local groups along with events and community announcements from schools and governments. A news section within the section shows stories from local newspapers, blogs and TV stations. Facebook isn’t paying licensing fees or sharing ad revenue with these outlets but said the tool drives new readers to them.

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Facebook said it’s learned from publishers’ input about what doesn’t work. For instance, it allows posts only from publishers registered with its “News page index,” which means they meet guidelines such as focusing on current events and information, citing sources and including dates and don’t have a record of publishing false news and misinformation. Obituaries from funeral homes or real estate posts – both of which previously showed up under “news” – are no longer eligible.

The company said publishers featured in Today In see a significant increase in “referral traffic” to their websites from Facebook, more so than when people see the same stories in their regular news feed, based on data from its test partners.

“(With the) news feed, people scroll through passively,” said Jimmy O’Keefe, a product marketing manager at Facebook. “We see that people engage with articles more than they would in news feed.”

Outside researchers studying local news data provided by Facebook found that about half of the news stories in the Today In feature met what they called a “critical information need” in the communities it served. This could be helpful for news publishers in determining coverage priorities and for Facebook as it tweaks how it presents news to its users.

Facebook learned that local news doesn’t work like national news. Political stories don’t generate a lot of local interest.

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When researchers looked at the types of news stories Facebook showed and how users interacted with them, they found that Facebook users interacted the most with stories serving a critical need – such as information on emergencies, transportation and health. Though there were more “noncritical” stories available, on sports, for instance, people didn’t interact with those to the same degree. The researchers – Matthew Weber at the University of Minnesota and Peter Andriga and Philip Napoli at Duke University – received no funding from Facebook.

The expansion to 6,000 cities doesn’t include large metro areas such as New York City, Los Angeles or San Francisco, where the abundance of news and population density make it more difficult to provide relevant local information. A big story in Brooklyn might be irrelevant on Staten Island a few miles away.

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