• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 9, 2019

As part of another big push into the news category, Facebook is preparing to add a new section to its app sometime this fall.    

To populate the forthcoming news tab, the tech titan is reportedly reaching out to the biggest publishers in the business, including Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Amazon’s Washington Post, and Disney’s ABC News.

That’s according to The Wall Street Journal (a Dow Jones property), which reports that Facebook is offering publishers up to $3 million in annual licensing fees in exchange for featuring their stories.

If publishers are receptive, the new service could challenge Apple’s News Plus offering and represent a realigning of Facebook’s content priorities.

But many publishers are viewing the offer with skepticism, if not outright scorn. The reaction "in the media Twitter world was, to say the least, unenthusiastic," writes Mediaite. "Many news organizations are understandably wary of working with Facebook after it rolled out a big push toward featuring news in its users’ feed years ago only to later backtrack and drop the initiative. And many of those news outlets who did embrace Facebook’s publishing platform gained very little traffic or revenue from the partnership."

Many news organizations are understandably wary of working with Facebook after it rolled out a big push toward featuring news in its users’ feed years ago only to later backtrack and drop the initiative. And many of those news outlets who did embrace Facebook’s publishing platform gained very little traffic or revenue from the partnership.

 

In early 2018, Facebook's News Feed began giving greater priority to fare from users’ friends and family. For Facebook, the changes were part of a broader effort to become more meaningful in people’s lives.

Citing a body of independent and internal research, the company reported in late 2017 that the more time people spend passively consuming information, the worse they feel.

In response, Facebook vowed to alter its News Feed to provide more opportunities for “meaningful” interactions, while reducing passive consumption of low-quality content.

For its latest effort, Facebook is reportedly asking publishers to enter into distributions deals lasting as long as three years.

Along with lucrative contracts, Facebook is also offering publishers more say over how their content appears to users, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

While news consumption habits continue to shift, consumers clearly love getting their news fix through social channels.

About one-fifth of U.S. adults get their news from social media, according to findings released late last year by the Pew Research Center.

That was slightly higher than the 16% of consumers who reported getting their news from print papers, which represented a shift from 2017, when about the same share of consumers got their news from social media and print.

As of late 2018, television continued to hold its position at the top of the news consumption food chain, Pew reported. Indeed, despite steady TV declines since 2016, 49% of consumers still follow the news from that most traditional of channels.

Challenging TV’s long-held dominance, however, 43% of adults now report getting their news from web sites or social media.