Today Facebook announced the launch of FB Newswire, an online trove of hand-selected and journal-verified news, all to help journalists share and embed the kind of content they want floating on Facebook. Andy Mitchell, director of news and global media partnerships at Facebook stated, "Every day, news is made on Facebook. More than one billion people use our platform to discover, explore and participate in news-making events around the world”.

Meant to be a real-time information platform for interested parties to mine, FB Newswire would include original photos, videos, as well as comments “posted by people on the front lines of major events such as protests, elections, and sports matches”. Having news be such an integral part of the Facebook community is more important than ever, and will also be facing its Twitter challenger; which has widely been used as an information and news vault for some time now. Additionally, adding a “digital newspaper” aspect to the social media network could give it a new edge for users it did not have before.

FB Newswire will partner with a news agency called Storyful, who is responsible in collecting the populous of news content that is shared among social networks. Located in just three offices on three different continents, Storyful will “use an algorithm to find popular and breaking news stories on Facebook” to find the latest breaking news in each category. It will also be the duty of the journalist to designate what stories are of value, what should be verified. After this, the content is sent to Storyful. Don't expect the content to be just about sports, elections, or protests from your own town, or state, however. Newswire is going to include international news, including stories in other languages than English. Facebook seems quite confident in its latest big move. Its primary goal is to help make it even easier for journalists to use content from Facebook in their own reports. Interesting, considering Google is the number one front page. Would you skip over Google News, just to find the same stories on a social media network?