Facebook launches discovery and curation tool called Signal for journalists

Continuing its aggressive courtship of news makers, Facebook is offering them Signal – a new tool for sourcing, gathering, and embedding content from its flagship network, as well as Instagram.

Called Facebook Signal, the new service allows journalists, writers, bloggers, whatever badge they apply to themselves, to search through Facebook to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook, and notably Instagram as well, for use in their writing and reporting. Mail, AOL Mail and so on.

Journalists can monitor which topics are trending on Facebook and then quickly display related content that has been shared publicly (unranked and in chronological order) from both people and Pages for deeper context. Previously, the mentions mobile app allowed only celebrities and public figures to upload video content that their followers can view.

Mashable reports that the director of media partnerships revealed that media organizations had been asking for a way to better use the social network for reporting purposes. A tool like Signal could be just a starting point for Facebook to springboard data products for use in various industries.

Journalists can also compare various topics, create embeddable collections of posts, and find Instagram posts by source categories like musicians, politicians, actors and sports teams.

Noto said: “I often get the question from friends [who] are like, ‘You know Facebook has over a billion users, ‘ and I’m like, ‘Well, we have an audience, depending on how you measure it, that’s pretty comparable”.

Recent launches such as the Trending section as well Instant Articles have all but confirmed the networks ambition to drive users to news content. Facebook’s Signal will leverage a combination of technology from CrowdTangled and Storyful to give journalist an edge in finding top trending topics.

Signal is designed in such a manner that it pulls content from both Facebook’s main app and Instagram.

Signal comes a week after the social networking giant expanded its live streaming feature to include all verified journalists, an effort that puts the company in competition with Meerkat, Periscope and YouTube.

Twitter also has a similar tool to “Signal” aimed explicitly at journalists called Curator.