Facebook is building its own newsletter tools, according to The New York Times. The social network is reportedly working on the initiative to offer more services to independent writers and journalists as part of the Facebook Journalism Project. It’s still in its early stages, but NYT’s sources said the tools may have features similar to those of other newsletter services. This means that they can include resources that writers can use to organize emails, manage subscriptions and help them grow their Facebook followers.
The newsletter industry has grown steadily in recent years, but it boomed last year, when many writers and journalists started their own after the COVID-19 blockades left many people in all sectors unemployed. Substack, founded in 2017, is one of the biggest players. It has 250,000 paying subscribers on its network and a list of the top 10 publishers generating a total of $ 7 million in annual revenue in September 2020. So it’s no surprise that big companies like Facebook want to take action. Another social network that is entering the newsletter business is Twitter, although it opted to purchase a well-known newsletter service called Revue instead of developing its own.
NYT’s The report says that Mark Zuckerberg noticed the growing trend for journalists to pursue a solo career and monetize their work through newsletters, which prompted him to urge the team to make the project a priority. That said, the tools do not yet have a release date, although executives apparently expect to release them this summer. Campbell Brown, vice president of global news partnerships at Facebook, told the publication:
“We want to do more to support independent journalists and experts who are building businesses and audiences online. We are exploring ways to help them benefit from the news products we create, such as Facebook News and subscriptions, while also building new tools to complement what journalists already find useful. “