Facebook teams up with Storyful to create social network generated newswire

Facebook has formed a partnership with Storyful, the Dublin-headquartered social media news agency, to create newsfeeds of original content generated by users of the world's biggest social network.

The new project is called FB Newswire and will be constantly updated with content on topics ranging from breaking news to sports results, entertainment and weather.

Áine Kerr, managing editor at Storyful, said yesterday: “We’ve been working on mining and discovering content on Facebook for three years. This was a natural progression for us.”

“We are partnering with Facebook to build a real-time home for verified images, posts and video,” she said.”We hope it will serve as a powerful tool and destination for newsrooms and journalists who are trying to source authentic content and amazing news stories.”

The newsfeed, drawn from Facebook's billions of users, will be sourced and verified by Storyful which was founded in 2008 by Mark Little the former RTÉ Prime Time presenter. The Irish founded company was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on December 18 for €18 million.

News content
The move by Facebook towards producing and highlighting more news content is seen as part of its move to compete against rival Twitter and others. Storyful said that Facebook users shared an estimated 684,478 pieces of content every minute.

Storyful has offices in Dublin, Hong Kong and New York and employs about 40 people. Ms Kerr said the partnership would Facebook would lead to additional hires, but declined to specify how many. "We've build new technology tools and matched that with experienced journalists to discover and verify stores. This deal pulls everything together."