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A version of this article was originally published on the NewsWhip blog.
In January, Facebook announced an update to the news feed which would “prioritize local news so that you can see topics that have a direct impact on you and your community and discover what’s happening in your local area.”
The New York Post and Los Angeles Times lead the list of local and regional news sites on Facebook.
The general idea is that users may be more interested in stories relevant to their community, helping foster the type of “meaningful interactions” that Facebook has stated it is looking to encourage in the news feed. Meanwhile, boosting the signal from local news sites helps fill any potential content gaps from other less reputable or relevant sources, which the platform has been trying to demote in visibility.
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So far, the move is restricted to U.S.-based publishers, many of which already perform strongly on social platforms. The last time we ranked Facebook engagements among regional publishers was in January 2017. Back then, many of the most popular stories related to local news stories, and human interest pieces. As the blog post put it:
“Many regional sites have been innovating on Facebook in particular, where the potential to reach large geographic-specific audiences is great… this data shows that regional sites have gone a long way towards establishing themselves as leading social publishers in their own right.”
One year on,