Facebook Rellocates News Team Resources, To Focus On Creator Economy
Meta Platforms Incorporated- owned, Facebook, has announced that it will be reallocating resources from its Facebook News tab and newsletter platform Bulletin, to focus more on the creator economy, senior executive Campbell Brown told employees in an internal memo.
Ms. Brown, a former journalist who leads Facebook’s global media partnerships, said the company would shift engineering and product support away from the two products as “those teams heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy."
Facebook News is a curated selection of news stories that users can find as a tab on the mobile app or website, similar to the Facebook Watch tab for video. Bulletin, which Facebook unveiled in June 2021, is a subscription platform meant to compete with Substack, aiming to support independent writers.
Ms. Brown thanked staffers for “the incredible, impactful and challenging work this Partnerships team has done to build out these experiences over the last several years."
She added, “For a lot of us—this was a labor of love and I know it’s hard to see these products put on the backburner. These are products that have delivered tremendous value for our partners and our users."
A Meta spokeswoman said the company regularly evaluates its products “to ensure we’re focused on the most meaningful experiences for people on Facebook and the future of our business."
She added, “We remain committed to the success of creators, and are doing even more to ensure they can find audiences on Facebook and grow engaged communities there."
Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News in 2019, at a time when publishers were growing increasingly frustrated that Facebook and Alphabet Incorporated-owned Google's were building a monopoly in the digital ad market.
Earlier, the company had signed deals worth tens of millions of dollars with news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. However, as these deals approach their expiration dates this year, Facebook has begun signaling to publishers and others in the industry that renewing the deals wasn’t a priority, according to The Journal.
Facebook’s shift away from its paid news product is being seen as a reaction to increasing pressure from regulatory authorities around the world that seek to make social media companies such as Facebook pay for news.
Reallocating resources from News and Bulletin is part of a broader shift within the company toward the metaverse and short-form video content creators that can compete with ByteDance Limited’s TikTok.
Ms. Brown, who as Facebook’s longtime news partnerships chief was the original architect of Facebook’s strategy of paying for news, was recently promoted to a broader role overseeing all media partnerships, including film and sports.
Facebook unveiled Bulletin last year, looking to capitalize on the newsletter boom with a platform that let journalists and other independent writers keep all of their subscription revenue. At the beginning, Facebook offered multi-year licensing deals to give writers time to build up their subscriber bases, launching with high-profile names such as former CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin, sports broadcaster Erin Andrews and author Malcolm Gladwell.
