“We’ve heard from journalists that they want an easy way to make Facebook a more vital part of their newsgathering with the ability to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and reporting”, he wrote in a blog post announcing the new tools. The same goes for Instagram posts, where Signal users can enter in specific Instagram handles and be presented with a curated newsfeed.
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The Signal tool also allows to monitor which topics and public figures are trending more on Facebook and Instagram.
This launch comes a week after Facebook made its “Mentions” app available to journalists with verified profiles.
Twitter has always been populated by journalists who seek and spread news right there; Apple is calling for publishing houses to offer content via its news platform; Google has been the one way you search for news for decades – and now Facebook is really getting into the news and content arena as well.
Signal focuses on trending and emerging topics across the site.
Signal is free to use, and functions as both a curation tool and a discovery tool. Signal makes it easier to find content, so presumably this means more of it will be showing up in articles and on blogs. Facebook is competing with other networks (see: Twitter) for your conversations around important and live events.
Andy Mitchell, director of media partnerships at Facebook, said that media organizations had been asking for a way to better use the social network for reporting purposes.
Like Facebook’s own Instant Articles effort, the duo is promising publishers that their participation in the program with guarantee faster and more reliable delivery of news stories.
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Furthermore, every Facebook post, every Instagram image or video, and every metric found in Signal can be easily saved into custom collections for later use in a downstream CMS for digital writers or for integration with broadcast graphics packages for broadcast teams.
