Twitter is the go-to social media spot for breaking news, but Facebook wants to change that with a new feature called FB Newswire.
Starting Tuesday, Facebook will surface original content posted by people at the scenes of newsworthy global events — photos, videos and text updates — with the aim of getting that content included in news articles.
Facebook will post that real-time content to the FB Newswire at Facebook.com/FBNewswire ... and even on rival Twitter at @FBNewswire.
"News is finding a bigger audience on Facebook than ever before," Facebook's media partnerships director Andy Mitchell wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday.
"Journalists and media organizations have become an integral part of Facebook," he wrote, adding that they have inspired both changes to the site's newsfeed and new features like trending topics.
FB Newswire is a partnership with social news agency Storyful, a News Corp.-owned company that works to verify or disprove breaking-news reports that fly around social media.
Facebook also used the FB Newswire announcement to reveal that the amount of referral traffic from its site to media organizations grew more than four times in 2013.
Facebook's relationship with some brands has been strained as of late. The site has made changes to its newsfeed including reducing the amount of text-only posts from brands, cutting the number of sidebar ads and discouraging "like-baiting" posts.