The Facebook Journalism Project will work as follows:

Collaborative development of news products

As people’s preferences for consuming news evolve, it’s critical to work together on figuring out which new storytelling formats will help people be more informed. We want to work with partners to evolve our current formats to better suit their needs and work with them on building entirely new ones. We've heard from editors that they want to be able to present packages of stories to their most engaged readers on Facebook. We’re starting to work with several partners on how best to do this. We’re going to start testing this using Instant Articles so that readers can start to see multiple stories at a time from their favourite news organisations. 

Local news is the starting place for great journalism — it brings communities together around issues that are closest to home. We’re interested in exploring what we can build, together with our partners, to support local news and promote independent media.

One key area of collaboration is existing and emerging business models. Many of our partners have placed a renewed emphasis on growing their subscription funnel, and we’ve already begun exploring ways we can support these efforts.

One of our longest standing traditions at Facebook is hackathons where our engineers take a break from their day-to-day work to explore new problems and technical solutions. We’ll be launching a programme, globally, where Facebook engineers will host sessions with developers from news organisations to collaborate to identify opportunities and hack solutions.

Training and tools for journalists

In addition to the newsroom training we currently offer, we’re now conducting a series of e-learning courses on Facebook products, tools, and services for journalists. We will be expanding this training to nine additional languages, and partnering with Poynter to launch a certificate curriculum for journalists in the months ahead.

We recently acquired CrowdTangle, a tool to surface stories, measure their social performance, and identify influencers. It will become free for our partners, which you can read more about on CrowdTangle.

Training and tools for everyone

We will work with third-party organisations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off our platform to help people in our community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust. Our longer-term goal is to support news organisations with projects and ideas aimed at improving news literacy, including financial grants where needed.

We recently announced improvements on our platform to further reduce the spread of news hoaxes — including ways for people to report them more easily and new efforts to disrupt the financial incentives for spammers. In addition, we launched a programme to work with third-party fact-checking organisations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles to identify hoaxes on Facebook. This problem is much bigger than any one platform, and it’s important for all of us to work together to minimise its reach.

This is just the beginning of our effort on that front — we have much more to do. The Facebook Journalism Project Page will serve as a hub for our efforts to promote and support journalism on Facebook.

You can read the full announcement here.