COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 22/08/2019
Mathew Ingram
Journalists who cover Facebook get used to a sense of deja vu. The social networking behemoth often tends to revisit things it has tried to do once—or even multiple times—in the past. The company says that’s because it is committed to “iterating” (as tech founders like to call it), which means trying the same thing over and over until it comes out right. The idea of employing journalists to curate the news definitely falls into that category. Facebook has said it is planning to roll out a new standalone tab for news, for which it is cutting lucrative deals with a number of leading publishers like The New York Times and Washington Post. And it is also hiring a handful of professional editors to curate the top headlines. But will the social network manage to make this unlikely marriage of humans and algorithms work any better than it did the last time?