Facebook wants to help journalists to look for what's new and trending in the news world and social media. The social network giant recently launched Signal, a tool to help find "newsworthy content" from Instagram and Facebook.
Up until now, journalists use Twitter to look for breaking news and other significant world events. It's usually found in the trending hashtags. Some news stories also depend on the tweets themselves, which are mostly found on celebrity breaking news.
Signal shows what's trending across Facebook and Instagram. It allows journalists to look at public posts, which are shown in a chronological order. Journalists can also enter search terms, according to The Verge. If someone is trending, there is a "Leaderboards" section that can show who is being talked about at the moment.
Facebook has already become a kind of a news aggregator because of the amount of shared news articles from other sites. Recently, it also launched its own live streaming feature that would rival YouTube, Meerkat and the popular Periscope.
Twitter has been trying to further help journalists with its own set of tools, however they are rarely used. Fortune reported that Twitter has Collections, a tool that helps a journalist find tweets regarding a certain topic. Twitter also has Curator, which is very similar to what Facebook's Signal does. The microblogging site is hoping that the tool would help increase traffic and interactions between journalists and their service.
Facebook is on its way to being the social media network for journalists. Before the launch of its live broadcasting Mentions app, the social network giant also launched Instant Articles. Facebook users who like to read news on their phones can use the feature to easily find articles from their partner news creators.
Journalists can search through the public Facebook posts for videos, photos and even conversations, WIRED reported. They can also use hashtags or locations to pinpoint what they like to find.
The power now lies within journalists. Facebook and Twitter are both huge entities in the social media world, but it would depend on the news reports on which they would prefer the most.
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