The Street is reporting that Facebook plans to launch a news service, in apparent partnership with news publishers:
“One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that ‘we want a subscription product — we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'” Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, an industry conference, in New York City on July 18. “And that is something we’re doing now. We are launching a subscription product.”
The paywall idea is based on premium and metered plans and has been in the works for a while, Brown said. It’s aimed at appeasing news organizations which had complained that they had little control over how their stories were being exhibited on Facebook. The News Media Alliance, which petitioned Congress, charges that Facebook and Google benefit from the work of hundreds of newspapers without fairly compensating publishers.
Print media disruption continues.