Facebook rolls out new Signal tools for journalists
Facebook introduced Signal, its newest effort to embrace media and journalists by providing them with the means to find and curate news across the social network, as well as Instagram. The tools will be free for journalists.
Andy Mitchell, director of media partnerships at Facebook: “We’ve heard from journalists that they want an easy way to make Facebook a more vital part of their news gathering 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.
Facebook is far from the only big Silicon Valley company looking to deepen its relationship with the media. Snapchat has been building out its Discover platform recently, while Twitter is working on its own curation tools with Project Lightning.
The group of tools will give journalists a behind-the-scenes look at what is trending on Facebook and find more on those topics.
Image: Facebook
There will also be an enhanced Instagram search that will allow for location and topic-based queries to find visuals.
“Using location-tag and topic-related search functionality, journalists can search Instagram for public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map,” Mitchell wrote.
Image: Facebook
Signal will also let journalists save posts into collections to organise material for later use. Those collections can then be embedded and continuously updated.
Image: Facebook
