Social networking giant Facebook has released a new tool to help journalists find, organise and publish content found on its extensive network, a move seen as an attempt to counter Twitter's dominance in the media sector.
The tool called Signal, helps journalists find, source, and embed content from 1.5 billion Facebook users and Instagram's 300 million users for storytelling and reporting. The tool will be free for journalists.
“We've heard from journalists that they want an easy way to make Facebook a more vital part of their newsgathering with the ability to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and reporting,” Andy Mitchell, director of media partnerships at Facebook wrote in a blog post. He stated that media organisations had been asking for a strategy to higher use the social community for reporting functions.