Facebook says it wants to do right by news organizations

Back in January, Facebook announced that it would henceforth de-emphasize posts from brands and publishers in users’ news feeds in favor of ones from friends and family. Media organizations–which have long been dependent on Facebook for traffic, albeit more than a trifle embarassed by that fact–took the shift as the company abandoning its role in news distribution rather than confronting ugly realities such as the scourge of bottom-feeder clickbait content and people living in Facebook-powered echo chambers.

Here at a session on news at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Alex Hardiman–the New York Times‘s veteran in charge of Facebook’s news products–acknowledged that “for too long, news feed unintentionally incentivized the wrong kind of behavior.” But she went on to detail the company’s current efforts to help producers of high-quality news find readers on Facebook and maybe even make money in the process. Some tidbits:

Facebook is surveying readers to determine what they consider to be high-quality news sources, but it’s taking pains to remove bias from this data, including throwing out responses that would skew the results. “This is not at all measured by popular vote,” Hardiman stressed.
The company is working with the Trust Project to gather and present facts on media outlets’ ownership and funding, ethics and correction policies, and other information that provides a picture of their commitment to quality.
It’s also working to add a news tab to its Watch video portal, which will include professional news videos funded by Facebook.
Facebook is ramping up efforts to monetize news on its platform–ranging from advertising revenue-sharing to the ability to put paywalls around stories–and says it now pays out $1 million a day to publishers.

“We know that we have a lot to do,” Hardiman said as her presentation closed. But she told people that the company will make “much, much more” news on the news front in the months to come.