Facebook News is a dedicated section within the Facebook app
that features curated and personalized news from hundreds of national, local
and lifestyle publications.
The product, which competes with Apple News, launched in the
U.S. last June and the U.K. is the second country to get access to it.
Facebook claims the product delivers "informative,
reliable and relevant news" to users "while also highlighting
original and authoritative reporting on pressing topics."
Jesper Doub, Facebook's European director of news
partnerships, said in a blog post on Tuesday: "This is the beginning of a
series of international investments in news."
He added: "The product is a multi-year investment that
puts original journalism in front of new audiences as well as providing
publishers with more advertising and subscription opportunities to build
sustainable businesses for the future."
Facebook announced the U.K. launch of Facebook News in
November, saying it would feature content from media partners including Conde
Nast, Hearst, The Economist, and Guardian Media Group.
On Tuesday, Facebook said it has now signed up Channel 4
News, Daily Mail Group, DC Thomson, Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph
Media Group.
Some content that is normally behind a paywall is free to view
on Facebook News, which is expected to launch in more countries this year.
"We'll continue to learn, listen and improve Facebook
News as it rolls out across the U.K. and into other markets, including France
and Germany, where we are in active negotiations with partners," said
Doub.
Tech giants like Facebook and Google are under increasing
pressure to pay media companies for their content.
A Facebook spokesperson told CNBC that the company will pay
certain U.K. publications to feature their content in Facebook News, but he was
unable to reveal how much.
"We will pay some publishers to participate in Facebook
News," he said. "We're paying for content which is not already on the
platform in order to achieve a diverse set of coverage across a range of topic
areas."
He added: "Monetization for the majority of publishers
appearing in Facebook News will be similar to monetization via other Facebook
tabs, from referral traffic to your sites or ads in Instant Articles, pushing
people to hit a paywall."
Last week, Google signed a deal to pay French publishing
companies and news agencies for their content.
The agreement comes after several months of talks between
Google France and the media groups, which are represented by France's Alliance
de la Presse d'Information Generale lobby.
Google said it would negotiate individual licenses with
members of the alliance that cover related rights and open access to a new
mobile service from the company called News Showcase.
The search giant said last year that it would pay news
publishers for the first time, a change of tack from the internet giant which
for years had refused to do so. The company agreed to a raft of initial deals
in Germany, Australia and Brazil, and now appears to be extending that to
France.
But when the Australian Government proposed a new law that
would force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for the right to link to
their content, Google threatened to pull its widely used search engine from the
country.
"Coupled with the unmanageable financial and
operational risk if this version of the Code were to become law, it would give
us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in
Australia," Mel Silva, managing director for Google Australia and New
Zealand, told a senate committee last week.
Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, told a press
conference "we don't respond to threats."