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Facebook will bring its Facebook News stand-alone news tab to the U.K. in early 2021.
The social network introduced Facebook News in October 2019 as a stand-alone tab in its flagship mobile application designed to feature the work of roughly 200 news outlets.
It became available throughout the U.S. in June as a bookmark in the Facebook app, with the social network saying at the time that its Today In local news discovery experience would be folded into Facebook News.
And in August, Facebook revealed plans to extend Facebook News to multiple countries, potentially starting with Brazil, France, Germany, India and the U.K.
Director of news partnerships Jesper Doub said in a blog post that the first group of publishers to be featured on Facebook News in the U.K. would include Archant, Condé Nast, The Economist, ESI Media, Guardian Media Group, Hearst, Iliffe, JPI Media, Midland News Association, Reach and STV.
Doub added, “These publishers are home to hundreds of the U.K.’s best known and most loved national and local news brands, including The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, Liverpool Echo, The London Evening Standard, Manchester Evening News, The Mirror, The Scotsman, STV and the Yorkshire Post, among others. Facebook News will also include content from lifestyle brands such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ, Harpers, Red, Tatler, Vogue and Wired. We expect many more partners to join prior to launch.”
Facebook said that over 95% of the traffic Facebook News drives to publishers in the U.S. is made up of new audiences that have not interacted with those news outlets in the past.
The social network also revealed a yearlong extension of its Community News Programme in the U.K., following a two-year initiative in which 80 journalists across the U.K. were trained in covering communities traditionally underserved by news media through the roughly $6 million program.
