Facebook to ‘Signal’ news gathering for journos

By NewsGram Staff Writer

Washington: Social networking giant Facebook launched an innovative news gathering tool 'Signal' which will help reporters in scanning and filing stories from information posted on Facebook and Instagram.

In a bid to take on the micro-blogging site Twitter which is the biggest source of breaking news for journalists, Facebook's free tool called 'Signal' would help journalists track relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts from nearly 1.5 billion Facebook users and Instagram's 300 million users for storytelling and reporting.

Director of media partnerships Andy Mitchell posted on Facebook, "We have heard from journalists that they want an easy way to make Facebook a more vital part of their news gathering. We are excited to introduce 'Signal', for Facebook and Instagram, a free discovery and curation tool for journalists who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy content from Facebook and Instagram, across news, culture, entertainment, sports, and more- all in one place."

With this tool, journalists interested in seeing what conversations are resonating on Facebook can monitor which topics are trending and then quickly display related content that has been shared publicly by people and from various pages for deeper context on those trends.

With the help of 'Signal', journalists can also access lists of public figures ranked by who is being mentioned the most on Facebook, including real-time conversations across politicians, authors, actors, musicians, sports teams, players and more.

Mitchell further posted, "Search functionality makes it easy to envision content directly related to a story or topic they are tracking. Using location-tag and topic-related search functionality, journalists can search Instagram for public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map."

Mitchell's Facebook post further revealed, "Every Facebook post, every Instagram image or video, and every metric found in Signal can be easily saved into custom collections for later use in a downstream CMS for digital writers or for integration with broadcast graphics packages for broadcast teams."

Journalists can easily embed any Facebook and Instagram post in their coverage by simply selecting and copying the post's embed code.

Newsrooms can integrate Signal APIs to feed curated content onto their websites and into their broadcasts, as well as produce native visualisations of curated Instagram content for events.

"This is a first step in helping journalists use Facebook and Instagram more effectively and we will gather feedback and iterate to make 'Signal' as useful as possible for industry professionals," Mitchell quipped.

With Inputs from IANS