It’s heeeee-ere: On Friday, the Facebook News tab we’ve been hearing about since the summer became reality, launching today to some users in the U.S. with “local original reporting by surfacing local publications from the largest major metro areas across the country, beginning with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta and Boston.” Facebook is calling this a “test,” and you may not see the tab — which for now is only on mobile — yet; about 200,000 U.S. users can see it now.

Facebook isn’t offering a full list of the publishers it’s working with, but here’s a sample (from which Vox Media is notably missing): The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune, Gannett, USA Today, McClatchy, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, Forbes, National Review, The Washington Times, Condé Nast, NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, Breitbart, and News Corp, including, yep, Fox News. (News Corp CEO Robert Thomson appeared Friday with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event with New York to announce the new product.) The Washington Post reported this week that 200 publishers are participating as of now. Facebook will honor publications’ paywalls; you’ll still need subscriptions to many of these outlets to read beyond a limited number of stories.

This is a huge moment for our relationship with the news industry. I know people have doubted us and our commitment to journalism but today should signal that we truly want to be a champion for great reporting. https://t.co/ygkltJHiXY

— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) October 25, 2019

Facebook’s new section of “trusted” news sources will include Breitbart, a website that featured a section on “black crime” and laundered white nationalist talking points https://t.co/TSxjca3IVG

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 25, 2019

It had been unclear whether The New York Times was in, but the Times itself seemed to confirm that it will be, at some point: “Facebook News will offer stories from a mix of publications, including The New York Times.”

Zuckerberg told the Times, “We feel acute responsibility because there’s obviously an awareness that the internet has disrupted the news industry business model.”

Facebook will pay publishers, including @nytimes

What’s more notable is this rare mea culpa from Zuckerberg:

“We feel acute responsibility because there’s obviously an awareness that the internet has disrupted the news industry business model,” https://t.co/n4Q82A4vHr

— Edmund Lee (@edmundlee) October 25, 2019

'When news is deeply-reported and well-sourced it gives people information they can rely on. When it’s not, we lose an essential tool for making good decisions.' It really is very hard to take this at face value in the context of the political ad policy https://t.co/wpxbfmb5P0

— Chris Moran (@chrismoranuk) October 25, 2019

Facebook stressed that it during this first test it will “showcase local original reporting by surfacing local publications from the largest major metro areas across the country, beginning with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta and Boston” — it’s a little unclear where publications like Business Insider and BuzzFeed News fit into that although I guess they could be slotted into New York pubs.

Some, but not all, of the publishers are being paid licensing fees to participate, in amounts that reportedly range as high as $3 million a year for the large national publications to “several hundred thousand dollars a year for regional publications,” The Wall Street Journal reported this week — but most, including, presumably, the small local papers that might need it most, aren’t getting paid at all. (This morning, the Journal noted that Facebook was offering “substantially more [than a few million] for the very largest outlets, according to people familiar with those talks.” News Corp’s deal will bring in “double-digit millions of dollars annually.”)

Thompson puts Zuckerberg on the spot and asks whether FB can pay local papers. He touts the separate product they've been developing: Today In, a local tab. He says he hopes to have financial relations there. Then he touts FB's $300m commitment to news.

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 25, 2019

The tab has some human-curated news: The “Today’s Stories” section is chosen by a team of “seasoned journalists” — independently and “free from editorial intervention by anyone at the company,” Facebook says, but chosen according to the guidelines here — among those guidelines:

Facts: The stories and headlines should aim to represent the people and events that took place, with information-rich supporting material, including figures and quotes (when applicable).
Diverse voices: Stories should include a diversity of voices, where relevant and especially concerning topics with multiple perspectives. Stories should be sourced, with few exceptions, from publishers who meet our inclusion criteria. Publishers will rarely appear more than once at any given time in each Today’s Stories unit.
Original reporting: Wherever possible, the team will prioritize original reporting, whether that means breaking the original story, or building on it. (Original defined as: a publisher has published new information or media (ie, interviews, photos) that no other outlet has).
On-the-record sourcing: The team will aim to prioritize stories with on-the-record sources rather than unnamed ones when two stories are otherwise equivalent. Curators will aim to prioritize stories with original supporting documents.
Timeliness: The team will work to ensure the most recent version of a story appears.
Depth and context: Curators will prioritize stories that include the most depth and context, including quotes, research, historical context, maps and data-visualizations where relevant.
Fairness: For heavily debated topics, curators will aim to curate stories that represent multiple perspectives on the issue.
Local reporting: The team will aim to prioritize coverage from local news organizations, if the publisher covers the area impacted by the news and its coverage is accessible to a national audience.

Mostly, however, the content is chosen by algorithm, with a personalized section that should theoretically get better the more you use it. There’s a top stories carousel up top and news arranged by topic (business, entertainment, health, science and tech, and sports — notably, politics is missing), a “Your Subscriptions” section “for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account,” and controls to let users customize what they see and hide publishers, topics, and articles they aren’t interested in.

One thing you won’t see here: Video. “Video will not be available in the launch version of the news tab,” Facebook says in its FAQ, “but we know the importance of video to our consumers and to publishers and will be working to add video capabilities in early 2020.”

This is an insanely cynical take, but it's not hard to see that the media extra-distrusts Facebook because Facebook forced a generation of media companies to pivot to video and Instant Articles without any revenue plan at all, and then walked away without any consequence

— nilay patel (@reckless) October 24, 2019

Reminder that

a) ~90% of Facebook users are outside the US
b) FB News so far US-only pilot, with few dozen partners
c) US is home to ~1,200 daily newspapers, 600+ TV networks, 15k+ radio stations, and many digital-born outlets

So let's see how this works out for everybody else https://t.co/OZRuHvF9LJ

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) October 25, 2019

Anyway, I understand why FB did this. They rightly realize that a lot of media coverage is explicitly (Murdoch) or implicitly (NY Times OpEd on ad revenue) driven by cash flow. But the blending of curated, paid news with UGC is going to lead to some really bad policy outcomes.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) October 25, 2019