Facebook began buying up "facebook-newsroom" domains this week, leading some to speculate that the social network may be getting into journalism or launching a social news website similar to Reddit.
The former could possibly happen since Facebook how has a journalist program manager named Vadim Lavruski, as we reported earlier, and a page on "Facebook Journalism." It's not much of a leap for the social network to make a standalone website -- especially for those doing livestreaming.
The social news site could also be a possibility with 700 million users adding news to a mammoth aggregator that would rival the usage of Tumblr, Reddit and StumbleUpon combined. The lack of social news is kind of a glaring hole in the Facebook universe now that it has music, movies and the Open Graph. It has already been busy making news more social with the Washington Post's new Social Reader, News Corp.'s The Daily and Yahoo News. (Which means you have to sign up to read them, give them access to all your information, and Facebook again has you in its no-privacy grip.)
The next step could be news sharing or something new for journalism, but it's obvious to us that Facebook isn't interesting in breaking new ground for the fourth estate. It's much more interested in making its users stay longer on its pages.
