Facebook announced a new experiment to make it easier for people to find local news.
The social network is testing a new section of its app called “Today In”, a mix of city-specific events, announcements and local news.
The test is successively in just six cities for now: New Orleans, Louisiana; Olympia, Washington; Billings, Montana; Binghamton, New York; Peoria, Illinois and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Users will be able to access the feature through the bottom-right menu button (☰) in the core Facebook’s mobile app.
It’s planning similar to something Google introduced last year with “Community Updates.”
The move comes as part of ‘Facebook’s Journalism Project Initiative’, a program the company declared in January 2017 that seeks to build out media and news organizations and journalists, among other goals.
Local news publishers who appear there will all be approved and evaluated by the company’s News Partnerships team. This team is overseen by former NBC News and CNN anchor Campbell Brown.
Facebook said it will explore rolling out ‘Today In’ to additional cities.
