LinkedIn increases its investment in news as most other major social platforms are deprioritising journalistic content, Axios reports.

As LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief and vice president Dan Roth told Axios’ Sara Fischer, the company supports over 400 news publishers to help them optimise their content on the platform; in the last six months the effort has expanded to 12 new markets.

“Unlike its rivals, LinkedIn is constantly looking for ways to drive traffic to relevant news content with things like publisher notifications and featured posts from LinkedIn News that draw from the published content on its site”, Fischer writes.

According to Similarweb data, traffic referrals from LinkedIn to news publisher sites has increased over the past several years, in contrast to Facebook and X where news outlets have seen sharp decreases in traffic.

In another sign of Meta’s deprioritisation of news, the company announced it would discontinue Facebook News, a dedicated tab for news content, in the United States and Australia and stop paying publishers for using their content when current contracts expire. (The feature was already deprecated in European countries last year).

In Australia, the government has reacted strongly to the announcement, threatening action against Meta over the change, and so did the country’s most influential media conglomerate News Corp.

Australia was the first major world country to oblige technology companies to pay for their use of news content under the News Media Bargaining Code in 2021. As Financial Times notes, under existing regulations “one option for the Australian government would be to ‘designate’ Meta, which would force the company into arbitration over payments to media companies or face financial penalties”.

TalkTV, a rightwing TV channel launched in the UK by News UK, will stop broadcasting on TV and go online-only after failing to amass meaningful television viewership and trailing behind its main rival GB News.

As The Guardian notes, the channel, which was launched in 2022, “got off to disappointing start with ‘zero viewers’ during primetime broadcasts”. By December 2023 it reached 2 million monthly viewers, “significantly behind its rival GB News, on 2.87 million, and little challenge to the dominance of Sky News, on 8.5 million, and the market leader, BBC News, at 11.4 million for the month”.

The company says it will now focus on online streaming and social platforms, including YouTube where TalkTV has over 800,00 subscribers.

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LinkedIn’s investment in news, TalkTV to stop broadcasting on TV – weekly news digest