Facebook Introduces a Local News Section in The United Kingdom

Facebook is one of the most used social media applications which keeps you updated with what your friends are doing or where they are going. Later, Facebook decided to launch a feature which will keep you updated not just about your friends but big news happening around the world and hence Facebook News came into production.

Facebook News links you up and shows you big stories of the day sourced from national publications but now the tech giant is bringing some changes in that feature as well by introducing an option which will allow you not only to read big events happening around the world but narrow down news from your locality for you as well.

The new local news section will collect and show content according to the geography. Users will just have to enable their location and the application will allow users to see at a glance and give a quick update about what is happening in their locality, hometown or city.

Facebook will push more relevant content to people based on their location and this will remove the need for individuals to manually connect with local publishers and instead of going to the hassle of keeping themselves updated with different news pages’ online members can just enable their location and will automatically receive notifications about events in their regions and cities making their life so much easier.

The localization launch is followed by the introduction of Facebook’s dedicated news section in the UK earlier this year when the social platform allotted a dedicated separate feed for curated news sourced from established publishers.

Why does this new feature matter so much? Well, a few months ago Facebook and the Australian government were head on head with each other with the Australian government claiming that Facebook makes most of its revenue through online ads and news content and therefore the Australian government demanded Facebook to pay a particular amount of earned revenue to the media organization in charge of each news, or ads as the Aussie Government thinks that Google uses the revenue income inappropriately and keeps all of it to itself thus it is better if they divide the revenue with all honesty. This lead to Facebook blocking Australian derived news articles on their platform and however, the blockage was revived after both of them reached an accommodation and therefore seeking more approval from audiences Facebook has been at pains to showcase its support for struggling local news vendors through its Community News Project, a £2.25m annual training fund to recruit reporters across the UK which has just been extended for another year and the company is paying millions of dollars to its publishing partners to help the declining journalism industry during such difficult pandemic times.

The local news section has been rolled out in UK, which was first introduced in US last year and will hopefully expand in other regions as well and hundreds of local and national news outlets have already signed up to Facebook News, opening up new revenue and audience channels for media outlets.


Read next: Facebook Introduces A New Prompt That Encourages Its Userbase To Get Themselves Vaccinated Against COVID-19
Previous Post Next Post