Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Facebook is taking another shot at news curation by hiring a “small team” of journalists to select stories for its upcoming News Tab, a section of its mobile app that’s due to begin testing later this year. Although The New York Times notes that most of the articles in the News Tab will be generated algorithmically, the top stories each day will come from this team of under 10 veteran journalists. The News Tab will be separate from Facebook’s main feed.
Facebook has struggled with how to surface timely news stories to its users. At its best, its previous “Trending Topics” section would often surface stories that were old and sometimes bore little relevance to the topic in question. However, at its worst, the algorithm that underpinned…