Facebook’s ‘local news’ timeline tweak is now live globally

Facebook wants you to forget about its woes just for a moment, and remind everyone that people do in fact still use it. Notably, not just people, local news outlets.

After it announced in January 2018 that users across the US will see more local news in their timelines, the company has now extended this tweak globally.

“With this update, we’re helping local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities,” Alex Hardiman and Campbell Brown, Facebook’s heads of news product and partnerships, respectively, clarified in a statement.

“We’ll consider a publisher as local to multiple cities if the people in those cities are more likely than the people outside of those cities to read articles from the publisher’s domain.”

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That suggests if you’re a fashion editorial from Cape Town, your stories are more likely to appear on Capetonian Facebook users’ timelines than an international fashion editorial.

In a statement made in January, Hardiman noted that the tweak to the news feed “may not capture all small or niche-interest publishers at first” but the company is “working to improve precision and coverage over time.”

Nevertheless, the news feed tweak should be live at the time of writing.

Feature image: Facebook