Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The media becomes an activist for democracy
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
March 4, 2016, 12:03 p.m.
Mobile & Apps
LINK: marketingland.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Shan Wang   |   March 4, 2016

Facebook will be opening up its chat app Messenger to publishers looking to distribute content through the service, Marketing Land reports. The announcement will reportedly be made at the company’s F8 developer conference on April 12, when Facebook also plans to officially announce that it’s opening its Instant Articles initiative to all publishers (though it let the cat out of the bag early on that front for various reasons). I reached out to Facebook, which declined to comment.

Axel Springer-owned German tabloid Bild tested delivering information via Facebook Messenger at the beginning of this year. Interested readers could subscribe by sending Bild Ticker a message. The experiments were limited in scope, delivering articles around the transfer window of the German soccer league and around a German version of the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (Hier erfährst Du die News als Erster!, reads an automated welcome message from the ticker).

Bild-messenger-700x1245

A Bild spokesperson told the Lab then that he believed Bild was the first Facebook-approved publisher to use Messenger to deliver articles.

In January, TechCrunch reported that Facebook had begun to allow developers to build chat bots for Messenger. Marketing Land writes:

It’s unclear how publishers might make money from the content they post to Messenger. According to TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to let businesses pay to message people who have already started conversations with them on Messenger, so it’s possible that publishers could use that to sell brands on sponsored messages the publishers would distribute through Messenger. But none of the people Marketing Land spoke with were aware of any revenue-generating plans for publishers within Messenger.

Rumors about Facebook opening up Messenger in this way have circulated for a while, but Twittersphere was abuzz with the news:

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”