In a bid to lure journalists away from Twitter, Facebook has introduced a news curation tool. Dubbed as Signal, the news gathering tool will allow journalists to discover all the latest social content.
“Today we’re excited to introduce Signal, for Facebook and Instagram, a free discovery and curation tool for journalists who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy content from Facebook and Instagram, across news, culture, entertainment, sports, and more—all in one place.”
posted Andy Mitchell, Director of Media Partnerships in a company blog.
Signal will allow journalists to monitor topics that are trending and then display related content that has been shared publicly. Facebook says that the content from People and Page will be unranked and in chronological order and offer deeper context on those trends. Signal comes with a Search functionality that makes it easy to surface content directly related to a story or topic that is been tracked by a journalist. Public figures such as politicians, authors, actors, musicians and others who are mentioned the most on Facebook are ranked by Signal.
In case for Signal on Instagram, Signal lets journalists search for visual content surrounding news events around the world. Journalists can use location-tag and topic-related search functionality to search Instagram for public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map. All of the posts found on Signal, from Facebook and Instagram, can be embedded directly from the platform.
Signal relies on technology from CrowdTangle and Storyful, as well as Facebook’s own Media Solutions application programming interfaces (APIs), to show trending and emerging posts and news stories. Facebook has been striving hard to tap the news curation market and recently announced Instant articles. Meanwhile, Twitter is also testing a new platform dubbed as Project Lightning that will allows users to keep a tab of current events in real time.