Facebook is making it easier for journalists to find content on the social network to use in their stories. The new program, called Signal, is only open to journalists and helps them search content on Instagram and Facebook that’s cleared for use outside the site.
Publications have been able to embed Facebook posts and Instagram photos for a while, but it’s always been a challenge to find the best content across social networks. Signal hopes to surface compelling content from everyday people.
Signal focuses on trending and emerging topics across the site. Members of the media see an unfiltered and unranked stream of public posts about a topic from Facebook users, a lot like a Twitter stream.
Journalists can also compare various topics, create embeddable collections of posts, and find Instagram posts by source categories like musicians, politicians, actors and sports teams. They can also use those source categories to see who is being mentioned most in various conversations.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to woo the media to work with its users’ content. The social media giant introduced Facebook Newswire last year to bring forward posts relating to hot news events that journalists could embed in their stories.
Many journalists use Twitter to find and illustrate news stories, which Facebook is trying to combat. Twitter doesn’t have any special tools for journalists to surface tweets, but there are many third-party outlets that can sift through Twitter for them.
Journalist can sign up for Signal today, but Facebook needs a full name, personal Facebook URL and work email, vetting submissions to keep non-journalists from signing up for the service.
