Facebook to launch subscription news service: reports

Facebook announced Wednesday that the company is debuting a subscription news product.

“One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that ‘we want a subscription product —  we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'” Campbell Brown, head of Facebook’s news partnerships, announced at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, according to The Street.

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Brown said that the product comes in response to complaints from news organizations over a lack of control they have over sharing articles on Facebook.

Many news organizations have been particularly frustrated with Facebook Instant, where articles load within Facebook’s platform instead of directing users to a new site.

The new product will prompt users through an in-app paywall to purchase a subscription after reading 10 articles on Facebook Instant.

Axios reported that the details are still being worked out, but that the news service will give news publishers full access over subscription data as well as control over what articles are or aren’t behind a paywall.

The company is reportedly discussing the service with publishers now and will begin testing it in October.

The announcement is Facebook’s latest maneuver to improve its relationships with news outlets. Such publishing media often expression tension between a lack of control over content and reliance on Facebook to drive traffic. In January, the company launched the “Journalism Project,” to spearhead such efforts.