Facebook launches Signal, a way for journalists to gather news without Twitter

The company is hoping to make it easier for reporters to surface and follow news on Facebook and Instagram as well as track down users’ reactions, photos, and videos related to news, sports, and entertainment.

All of the posts found on Signal, from Facebook and Instagram, can be embedded directly from the platform.

Part of the usefulness of Signal is that it gives journalists access to multiple highly sorted newsfeeds of public content. Right now, items like the Trending topics feature are influenced by a users personal profile interests including what pages they’ve liked and what content they engage with. By giving journalists more effective tools to use the site to discover content and embed it in their stories, Facebook is building up a symbiotic relationship with publications that may grow to see more of the actual articles being published entirely on Facebook through initiatives like Instant Articles and those that follow it.

Signal basically assists media outlets to find, filter and embed content from Facebook as well as Instagram – for news purposes, of course.

The service relies on technology from CrowdTangle and Storyful, as well as Facebook’s own Media Solutions application programming interfaces (APIs), to show trending and emerging posts and news stories on several topics, provide lists of people who are being mentioned the most, and offer rich post search tools. The tools will be free for journalists.

There’s a battle for content coming up among the big giants of tech and while it remains to be seen who will be the next monopoly, the more vulnerable networks like Twitter, are clearly in for a bigger challenge and already exists for the company.

Facebook introduced Signal, its newest effort to embrace media and journalists by providing them with the means to find and curate news across the social network, as well as Instagram.

Signal users will be able to create collections of Facebook posts and Instagram images and videos for later use and sharing, particularly with their broadcasting teams.