Storyful to power Facebook’s new FB Newswire service

24 Apr 2014

Facebook is launching a new service called FB Newswire featuring hand-picked, journalist-verified stories that will be powered by Irish company Storyful. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp acquired Storyful in December for €18m.

Storyful was established by former RTÉ Washington correspondent Mark Little three years ago as a way of pulling together news from a variety of online and social news feeds.

Described by Little as “the first news agency of the social media age”, News Corp bought the company for €18m in December.

“For over three years, Storyful has been mining the social web – including Facebook – for the most compelling content, separating news from noise, truth from fiction, and sharing the stories worth telling,” wrote Storyful’s Aine Kerr in the company’s blog.

A new layer of verification and engagement

“Today, we are partnering with Facebook to build a real-time home for those verified images, posts and videos.”

It is estimated that Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content every minute.

The new FB Newswire, powered by Storyful, will select the best content from a multitude of categories, including news, weather, viral, entertainment, lifestyle, sports and celebrity.

“Storyful’s discovery technology and expert journalists will bring a new layer of verification, curation and community engagement to content on the platform,” Kerr added.

“We will be finding and verifying compelling videos, images and posts around breaking news stories and tentpole events, unearthing trends and memes and debunking false stories and myths.”

Social news reader image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com