• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 11, 2017

Although Facebook still doesn’t want to be thought of as a media company or publisher, the tech giant increasingly sees news stewardship as central to its mission.

To that end, it just launched the Facebook Journal Project -- a new program to establish stronger bonds between news publishers, and help them thrive in the digital age.

“We will be collaborating with news organizations to develop products, learning from journalists about ways we can be a better partner, and working with publishers and educators on how we can equip people with the knowledge they need to be informed readers in the digital age,” Fidji Simo, director of product at Facebook, notes in a new blog post.

While Facebook has collaborated with news organizations in the past, it will now seek to connect their respective product and engineering teams at earlier stages of the development process.

From Live to 360 to Instant Articles, Simo said the new initiative will also result in changes to Facebook’s current formats.

“For example, we’ve heard from editors that they want to be able to present packages of stories to their most engaged readers on Facebook,” Simo said. “We’re starting to work with several partners on how best to do this.”

As such, Facebook will soon begin testing such packages using Instant Articles, so that readers can start to see multiple stories at a time from their preferred publishers. Plus, Facebook is interested in testing new products to promote local news and “independent media.”

The social network is also thinking about publishers’ bottom line.

“Many of our partners have placed a renewed emphasis on growing their subscription funnel, and we’ve already begun exploring ways we can support these efforts,” Simo noted.

Among others, Facebook’s engineering team is working with the engineering team of the German news organization BILD to test free subscription trials from within Instant Articles.

Wednesday’s announcement comes at a time when many in the media business are still trying to determine if Facebook is friend or foe. In a Live video one-on-one chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called Facebook “a new kind of platform.”

Whatever that means, Facebook executives know they increasingly serve as gatekeepers between publishers and readers. The social giant has slowly realized it is partially responsible for policing the veracity of the content that flows through its platform.

As such, in partnership with top third-party fact-checking organizations, Facebook recently launched a full-frontal attack on so-called “fake news.”

More broadly, Facebook’s Instant Articles program -- which helps publishers serve content to mobile consumers more quickly -- is facing increasing competition from Apple News and Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The latter has already expanded beyond news into other categories, from query results to ecommerce to advertising.

In response, Facebook has offered partner publishers access to several new ad options, including larger mobile display ads, and -- for those using the Facebook Audience Network -- video and carousel formats.

Previously, Facebook increased the number of ads allowed per each article and began testing native call-to-action features in Instant Articles. It also rolled out a new feature allowing users to send each other links to Instant Articles in its popular Messenger function.

Facebook recently added 360 videos and photos to Instant Articles. It also hired former CNN host Campbell Brown to lead its News Partnerships team, working closely news organizations and journalists.

Brown, who previously served as a correspondent for NBC News, noted the news media business is currently undergoing a fundamental shift. More to the point, she admitted that Facebook is responsible for much of that shift.