Facebook has gone into the news business, debuting a new collaboration with nine international media outlets that will feature interactive, multimedia news stories hosted directly on the social media site's mobile app.
The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC News and The Atlantic joined British news giants The Guardian and BBC News, and Germany's Spiegel and Bild in the project to publish their articles on Facebook's site.
"Fundamentally, this is a tool that enables publishers to provide a better experience for their readers on Facebook," the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, said in a Facebook blog post.
News outlets want to reach Facebook's 1.4 billion monthly users, without losing control of their revenue streams or their brands, according to reporting by the New York Times.
The deal allows the news outlets to sell advertising in their articles, keeping the revenue, or allow Facebook to manage ad sales for a 30 per cent cut.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
Mark Thompson, New York Times president and chief executive, said his newspaper had "a long tradition of meeting readers where they are". That means being available on social media sites frequented by many current and potential Times users, he wrote on the Facebook blog.
Spiegel Online editor-in-chief Florian Harms wrote on his website that the collaboration was a "test" in which the company hopes to learn how best to bring its content to social media.
He said Facebook would have no editorial influence over the weekly's "independent and critical" reporting.
Articles will be designed for the interactive smartphone-based world, with multimedia bells and whistles like zoomable photos and pre-loaded, autoplaying audio and video clips, Facebook said in a video introducing the service.
The service, called Instant Articles, also aims to cut the average eight seconds impatient smartphone users now spend waiting for linked articles to load, a new-media eternity Cox called a "big deal".
Facebook said the new articles would load as much as 10 times faster.
