Sticky wicket

What’s happening at the Facebook Journalism Project?

Helen Sullivan
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read
Áine Kerr is the manager of Journalism Partnerships at Facebook

One of the things Áine Kerr is most looking forward to about her trip to Sydney is the coffee. Kerr leads global journalism partnerships at Facebook. One might suspect that she needs a lot of coffee indeed.

Kerr is coming to Sydney as part of the Storyology festival, where she’ll be delivering a keynote on the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP) and discussing “The New Newsroom”, or how news organisations can better connect with their audiences as they shift from advertising to reader revenue, on a panel with Google and Rappler.

Facebook is the fifth most valuable company in the world. The company is at the centre of massive upheaval for media organisations and the journalists who work for them: from dwindling advertising revenues, to proliferating fake news websites hitching a ride in Facebook’s traffic.

Launched in January this year, the Facebook Journalism Project, in which Kerr plays a leading role, has three “pillars”: the collaborative development of news products; training and tools for journalists; and training and tools for an informed community. The project’s six-month update, published on July 20, lists a dizzying number of meetings and new tools, tests and iterations in progress.

In an interview with the Walkleys, Kerr says her proudest moments so far have been the launch of the FJP and the project’s first working group on news literacy. Held at Arizona State University, the working group brought together 60 global “influencers” — educators, librarians, researchers and academics — to discuss how to teach people to distinguish reliable news from online misinformation.

In a release following that event Kerr explained that news literacy “is part of the bedrock of journalism.”

It’s “what publishers are doing every day when they think about design, engagement, value and purpose, interactivity, building trust and loyalty,” she wrote.

Facebook is also working to disrupt the financial incentives motivating online misinformation and to help people mark fake stories. In addition, they’re experimenting with broadening Facebook users’ political horizons: Kerr explains that they’ve piloted a tool that shows people a suite of articles related to a given topic on Facebook, in an effort to show them more than one side of a big story. They tested it at this year’s presidential elections in France.

“I don’t want to see false news on our platform, it runs counter to [our mission], which is to build informed communities,” says Kerr. “We’re committed to ultimately working on this issue until we get it right.”

Two billion people use Facebook every month, many of whom are journalists who use it not just to get more eyeballs on their stories, but also to help them write those stories. Who hasn’t seen a journalist friend publish a post like, “Help! Looking for people to interview about X”.

So online misinformation is just one part of what Facebook is trying to fix and improve when it comes to their relationship with journalists. Facebook has partnered with the Florida-based nonprofit Poynter Institute on a “Facebook for Journalists” certificate that teaches journalists how to find stories, publish them and build an audience to read them, all on Facebook. And the company has bought social monitoring tool CrowdTangle and made it free for publishers and journalism schools to use. This seems to be in an effort to help make its metrics less opaque to publishers wondering why their content isn’t being seen.

Kerr adds that one of the things journalists are using “to really powerful effect”, is groups. She uses the example of Vox, who she explains has been doing this with their coverage of healthcare: “They’re creating a community dedicated to that one topic and issue and having their journalists going in every day asking questions.”

Kerr speaks quickly as it is, and especially so when she’s reeling off the FJP’s many activities over the last few months. “What is really powerful about Facebook is [that they] run very fast at things, iterate, learn quickly, take the feedback, iterate again,” she says. In other words, the approach is to try everything, and see what sticks.

It’s 7.30pm when we speak, and in Kerr’s hand is what looks distinctly like a takeaway coffee cup.


Don’t miss Áine Kerr at Storyology, the Walkley Foundation’s journalism festival, August 24–31. Buy tickets and check out the full program (including events in Brisbane and Melbourne).

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Helen Sullivan

Written by

Morning mail Guardian Australia; Stories for The New Yorker, The Monthly, Mamamia and book reviews for The Sydney Morning Herald. Editor of Prufrock Magazine.

The Walkley Magazine

Inside the Australia and New Zealand media – stories by and for journalists.

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