
Introducing: The Facebook Journalism Project - ents
https://media.fb.com/2017/01/11/facebook-journalism-project/
======
jawns
This is sort of like Amazon announcing that it wants to strengthen its
partnership with mom-and-pop shops, and help those mom-and-pop shops sell
products in new and innovative ways.

I'm a former journalist who used to work for a metro daily newspaper that has
long suffered, as most newspapers have, from declining ad revenue.

For these papers, the only reason to partner with Facebook is because they
feel they have little choice. They would much rather have a healthy revenue
stream and be self-sufficient.

But so far, the news industry has not found anything that adequately replaces
the print-ad-driven business model that served it so well for so long.

So they're willing to try just about anything -- including, apparently,
accepting a dinner invitation from a reputed cannibal.

~~~
philippnagel
I am currently tinkering with something that might help.

Basically you would "sell" your readers CPU/GPU time to us via a small JS-
script embedded into your page to power ML/DL and scientific computation tasks
(similar to BOINC). Thoughts?

~~~
MasterScrat
Reminds me of the hackathon project made by MIT students. It was the same idea
but it would mine BTC instead of doing ML in Javascript.

Site archive here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140425180831/http://tidbit.co....](https://web.archive.org/web/20140425180831/http://tidbit.co.in/)

To be honest if I had a dead simple way to pay a few cents to read an article
I would do it for a number of publications. But I'm not willing to signup
individually to each one.

~~~
philippnagel
Seems like [https://flattr.com](https://flattr.com) is what you are looking
for. It's a shame it isn't integrated widely.

~~~
Larrikin
The thing I don't line is that it's still very active instead of passive. I've
been using rescue time to track time wasting. it'd be great to have a if there
was something similar that presented the places I went and percentage of time
I spent there with my budget spread accordingly.

Ideally with some kind of black list or white list feature.

------
mattlevan
Is there anything Zuckerberg _doesn 't_ want to get his company involved with?

It's been said on HN again and again, but I'm really looking forward to a
decentralized digital publishing platform that gains momentum and actually
gives Facebook a run for its money.

Anyone know of any such existing platforms up and running now? Last I looked
into this, I discovered "Steemit", but it doesn't seem very promising.

~~~
notatoad
>Is there anything Zuckerberg doesn't want to get his company involved with?

I've seen quite a few comments (on HN and elsewhere) since all the "fake news"
buzz started saying essentially "Facebook needs to stop pretending they aren't
a news company. They are where people get their news, and they need to take
responsibility for that"

And I completely agree. Whether zuck wants to be in the news business or not,
he already is. Might as well do a good job of it.

~~~
aphextron
>And I completely agree. Whether zuck wants to be in the news business or not,
he already is. Might as well do a good job of it.

No, they're not. Facebook is a news aggregate. They are no more in the News
business than I would be if I wrote a script to scrape news web sites for
articles to read myself.

The confusion between actual news sources and information aggregates online
has caused this "fake news" crisis in the first place.

------
setra
I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative
media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have
really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.

~~~
collias
Exactly. Yesterday was a great example of mainstream sources losing
credibility.

They were all over the (as far as I know) totally unverified document that an
intelligence agency decided to leak to Buzzfeed for some reason.

They wonder why no one trusts them anymore...

~~~
threeseed
The mainstream media did a fine job. Your criticism is completely misplaced.

The New York Times, CNN, Guardian etc all reported the verified facts. Which
is that a report was produced by an ex-MI6 spy looking into allegations that
Russia had amongst others compromising video involving prostitutes/golden
showers and President Elect Trump. This report was obtained by John McCain and
passed to the FBI for verification. They didn't publish the report. They
didn't publish the allegations. The presence and gist of the report is
newsworthy because the spy in question has by all accounts impeccable
credentials which McCain and the CIA/FBI made statements about. That is all
they reported.

BuzzFeed were the ones who decided to publish the report and all of the above
organisations heavily criticised them for it afterwards questioning their
ethics etc.

~~~
bobcostas55
>They didn't publish the report. They didn't publish the allegations.

That just makes it worse, doesn't it? The actual allegations are so insane
it's obvious they're fake. By hiding them, they make it appear credible.

~~~
nl
Wait, what?

So if they do publish the report (ie, Buzzfeed) then they get blamed for
publishing false news.

If they report that the report was published, they get blamed for making it
appear credible

I'll also point out that if they don't report things they get accused of being
involved in a cover up.

What do you propose here exactly?

------
resfirestar
I'm interested to see where the local news initiative goes. Big outlets have
plenty of room to innovate with or without Facebook's help, but newspapers
outside of state capitals seem to be in a difficult position of falling
subscriptions and no way to replace that revenue online.

~~~
the_watcher
The local news piece was by far the most interesting to me as well. Until
recently, nearly all journalists got their starts in local news, and as
Facebook correctly notes, it has the advantage of focusing on stories that
actually impact the intended audience's day to day life. Also, since the
readers are often closer to the actual events, players, and issues described,
it's arguable that the readers are less susceptible to the opinion disguised
as reporting that typifies much of partisan, new media (although I'll admit
that this is arguable at best, and assumes that the readers actually _want_
their reporting to be factual).

~~~
soundwave106
My personal social media experience at Nextdoor (which is focused completely
on the local), and I know this is anecdotal, is that that a lot of the people
cut out the big, over-dramatically sweeping hyperbolic politics when the topic
/ scope of conversation is more localized in nature. At least, I mostly see
reports on the neighborhood, events and complaints, services advertisements,
etc. People have opinions, of course, but its not the binary hyperbolic type
stuff that personifies too much of national politics (and sadly tends to leak
over on too many Facebook posts).

(From this viewpoint, I'd see a model like Nextdoor an easier fit for a local
news initiative... Facebook's scope just seems too global at first glance for
them to do a very good job.)

------
6stringmerc
Notably absent:

Any mention of compensating the "participants" that Facebook is, I'd wager,
pitching behind-the-scenes as a gigantic pool of free talent / labor ripe for
monetization both as advertising targets and content generators!

Disclosure: I'm on Medium and don't get paid diddly for my writings on there,
nor spend much of any time investing in the Facebook ecosystem because it
reminds me too much of AOL.

~~~
imh
I'd imagine that in a pay-per-whatever, traditional news orgs aren't going to
beat clickbait trash orgs. They talked about trying to help the news orgs
subscription funnel, which seems a better solution.

------
maxfurman
This will not work, because the problem is not a lack of "news literacy," the
problem is confirmation bias.

------
randomgyatwork
I get it, fake news is a problem because a new product is coming to solve the
'problem' of fake news.

~~~
IIIIIIII
I wonder if the product will be a revamp of the old Facebook paper/reader-app
("all your contents are belong to us")

honestly though I don't think FB/Zuck is quite so cynical yet

------
niftich
Facebook wants to solidify being a content portal for news. Its competition is
Google with AMP, Google and other search engines without AMP, and first-party
content producers, and 'orthodox news aggregators'. Both Facebook and Google
have an advantage: they have hyperlocal info and tons of data on users
collected through their tracking and ad networks, they are two of the most-
visited websites and most-used apps in the world; meanwhile they subsume all
the advantages of an old-style news aggregator by having a wide variety of
third-party content they never had to pay for.

'Emerging business models': Facebook is a large IdP containing identities that
they monetize through data mining with the goal of display ads. But this IdP
allows their users to log in to other sites and engage in microtransaction-
like behavior. Aside from making actual payments to FB, users could trade off
'ad credits' or whatnot. Flattr, Webpass are in this space; Google tried this
with Contributor [1], which is about to see a revamp; Brendan Eich is trying
this with Brave, but Facebook's install base and ability to focus and deliver
means they could probably pull this off better than everyone else.

[1] [https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-
new-...](https://www.slightfuture.com/blog/google-contributor-no-new-signups)

------
ABCLAW
There's a continuing thread through these 'fake news' and 'new journalism'
discussions, namely that there is a need for express interference in
information circulation. This is premised upon the notion that there is a
defect in circulation, but little discussion of the actual details of that
circulation, its aims, and its qualities. The result is a discussion which has
no direction, buffetted to and fro by the winds of self-interested parties.

Is there any appetite to begin a multi-disciplinary conversation about what
constitutes an effective conversation? I feel as if there's disconnect here,
one that leaves us all poorer, if only intellectually, as a result.

------
codr4life
Oh come on, everyone and their mom knows Fakebook is the prime peddler of
corporate and government bullshit; smearing more lip stick on that pig changes
nothing.

------
aphextron
I think this can only be positive. The status quo now is that real journalism
is dying while clickbait nonsense makes makes money. If Facebook can work with
traditional news agencies, whose strengths are their rigorous fact checking
and journalistic integrity, to help them monetize more effectively then
everyone wins.

------
stevehiehn
I love this. I don't think FB is the stream of consciousness feed it once was.
So why not embrace a new use case: A one stop news shop for both micro & macro
news!

------
pp19dd
Here's a big punchline buried in this release: crowdtangle is now free. That's
$30k value (+/\- number of seats) given away to struggling news organizations.

------
stevehiehn
It would be amazing if FB was to try & use sentiment analysis to offer
opposite stories for every issue. Maybe that would help people to see more
sides to an issue.

------
ihsw
It still doesn't change the fact that news orgs universally lack the time to
conduct real journalism -- fake news is a direct result of reducing the time
that journalists have to vet and verify content.

Frankly I'm quite happy about "fake news" proliferating, it makes obvious how
hopeless and useless news orgs are. They peddle claptrap and tripe with
reckless abandon.

Facebook could throw ten thousand engineers at the problem and 1) it wouldn't
fix that nobody trusts Facebook 2) it wouldn't fix that nobody trusts news
orgs. Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan needs to taken as religious dogma
-- everybody gets as voice and Facebook has no say in who can't speak.

To any news tweeps reading: combating "fake news" by partnering with Facebook
is a partisan attempt at self-fellatio -- all you do is get yourself off
without accomplishing anything. Conduct real journalism with well-paid staff
that have the time to do their job and anonymously share it with the public is
the only way to restore trust, not 1) procuring access to high-value talking
heads (eg: celebrities, pundits, "experts") that will regurgitate your
propaganda or 2) shoving out unverified garbage (eg: 99% of reporting on Trump
this past election cycle) at light-speed.

#1 is just a sad attempt at remaining relevant while having someone
authoritative make an empty appeal to viewers and #2 is plain laziness.

~~~
mcintyre1994
What do you mean by fake news?

It seems to have started out as actual made up news by
organisations/people/websites pretending to be news organisations, but
actually just making things up - eg. The pope endorsing Trump story and I'm
sure loads more on both sides.

Then some professor published his list of fake news sites, and included a
bunch of conservative media sites as well as satire as well as obvious fake
news, there's probably some liberal legitimate media sites there too.

Then after Trump won conservatives started saying every liberal media site had
been peddling fake news when they reported polls etc had him way down and
Hillary was winning.

I've probably missed a load more things but my point is, I have no idea what
fake news is at this point - but I do know that at least some of it isn't a
result of a lack of time by legitimate journalists, some of it is just people
making stuff up.

~~~
threeseed
Fake news should only really refer to the type of news that was generated from
the kids in Eastern Europe i.e. completely made up with zero truth behind it.

Unfortunately fake news has come to mean "news that I disagree with".

Like today when Trump tweeted that the BuzzFeed story was fake news even
though there was nothing fake about it. Just that the claims were as yet
unverified.

~~~
randyrand
There's plenty of fake news on both sides. It's amazing to me that people can
be so far up their ass to no not notice that.

~~~
gdulli
> Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how
> many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there,
> which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

> Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they
> just never take the bait.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-
finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs)

~~~
ulucs
>> Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but
they just never take the bait.

If you see this and your bias alarm isn't going crazy, then it needs some
heavy readjustment.

------
Ghostium
Introducing: The Facebook Censoring Project

~~~
threeseed
Fine line between censorship and moderation.

~~~
ljk
pretty clear line:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-
censo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-
tool-china.html?_r=0)

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38073949)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-
busin...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/xiangwang/2016/11/24/doing-business-the-
chinese-way-facebook-develops-a-censorship-tool/)

list goes on

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tucif
I read this as if Facebook is posing itself to become kind of a "Journalism
PaaS". That'd be an interesting shift.

------
llccbb
>Local news is the starting place for great journalism.

Not in my experience.

------
nutate
Just in time!

