Supporting Independent Voices
Article
March 16, 2021
By: Campbell Brown, VP, Global News Partnerships and Anthea Watson Strong, Product Manager, News
As writers, experts and journalists publish more of their work independently, we’re working to better support those efforts and make it easier for those content creators to build businesses online.
In the coming months in the U.S., we’ll introduce a new platform to empower independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and grow their businesses. We will start by partnering with a small subset of independent writers. The platform will include a variety of support focused on content creation and audience growth, including:
- A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter
- An integration with Facebook Pages to enable publishing across various multimedia formats including photos, live videos and stories
- The ability to create Facebook Groups and nurture a community of readers
- Features to help audiences easily discover new content and writers, and in turn help those creators build direct relationships with their audience
- Insights for writers to understand how content is performing
- Monetization tools to build successful individual websites and businesses, starting with subscriptions
- Accelerator services to help creators come together and learn best practices
A large part of this initiative is aimed at supporting independent local journalists who are often the lone voice covering a given community. We’ll work to include them at launch, and build tools and services specific to their needs. Since 2018, we’ve invested $600 million to support journalism and we’re investing $1 billion in news over the next three years. We will continue to support publishers through the Facebook Journalism Project, our existing products and initiatives such as Facebook News, Accelerators, grants, subscriptions tools, Instant Articles and more.
The independent creator space is growing. We fully support the work that others are doing and want to ensure that we can provide additional avenues for growth and monetization as well. We’re just beginning this work and look forward to collaborating with creators of all kinds to build products and features that can have a meaningful impact in sustaining their work.