SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is pitching a new media initiative to license articles from some of the largest American news publishers and display that content inside the social network’s mobile app, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.
The project involves the social network striking deals potentially worth millions of dollars to publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, among others, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The agreements would let Facebook pull in headlines and previews of the articles from partner publications for display inside a “News” tab in the Facebook app, they said. The talks with news organizations are continuing, they added, and it is unclear if any deals are close. Facebook hopes to introduce the effort by the end of the year.
Representatives for Dow Jones, The Times and The Post declined to comment. A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that the company was aiming to include a “News” tab inside its app by the end of the year, but declined to comment further. News of the talks was first reported by The Journal.
Facebook’s pitch is the latest move by a major tech platform into the digital news and entertainment space, as companies vie for people’s attention. In a partnership with publishers, Google has developed Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, to load articles faster on smartphones. Snapchat has also locked in revenue-sharing deals with publishers on its “Discover” tab inside its app.
In the past, Facebook secured deals with publishers — including The Times — that sucked entire articles into its app for them to load faster and provide what the company called a “better user experience.” But that project, called Instant Articles, fizzled shortly after its debut.
As Silicon Valley players have continued courting the news business, publishers have grown wary for fear of tech companies’ luring audience loyalty away from publishers’ sites.
Facebook is trying to differentiate its new product from past offerings. In its pitch, the company said its “News” tab would not display the main text of articles inside Facebook’s app. Instead, it would link to publishers’ sites or apps and direct users elsewhere to read whole articles, the people familiar with the plans said.
That has proved more enticing to some publishers than a deal proposed by Apple this year. The Apple News app, which costs subscribers $10 a month, pulls in entire articles from partner publishers, which include Vice Media and New York magazine. Apple takes half the overall revenue, while the publishers split the remaining 50 percent, paid to each outlet on a per-view basis.
Publishers including The Journal joined the Apple News effort. Others, like The Times and The Post, declined.
“We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else,” Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times Company, told Reuters in an interview this year. “We’re also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix with everyone else’s journalism.”