Facebook Will Prioritize Local Stories In Your News Feed (engadget.com)

Facebook announced today that it will begin prioritizing local news, bumping it up higher in your feed if you follow a local publisher's Page or if a friend shares a locally-published story. "We are prioritizing local news as part of our emphasis on high-quality news, and with today's update, stories from local news publishers may appear higher in News Feed for followers in publishers' geographic areas," Facebook said in the announcement. Engadget reports: Facebook, which recently announced it would be shifting its News Feed focus away from news and more towards friends' posts, says the local news prioritization will kick off in the U.S., but it plans to expand it to other countries this year. "These efforts to prioritize quality news in News Feed, including this local initiative, are a direct result of the ongoing collaboration with partners," said Facebook. "Our goal is to show more news that connects people to their local communities, and we look forward to improving and expanding these efforts this year."

Comments

Re:Bad move in much of the world

[Obfuscant]

Now Facebook is going to push local propaganda over reputable international news coverage. This is not an improvement.

You're blaming Facebook for not showing you what you want to see, and you still use facebook?

Who cares what Facebook pushes? If you care, don't get your news from Facebook. Maybe the improvement will be that more people will realize that Facebook is not a source of news?

Re:Yeah right

[Trogre]

Incompetent? You realize their mission is not to keep you happy, right?

Their mission is to keep you (the product) using their service and to manipulate the content you are exposed to in order to maximize exposure for their customers (the advertisers).

They just have to keep it entertaining enough to keep you below the threshold of annoyance below which the cost of leaving exceeds the cost of staying.