Facebook is ramping up its news coverage by integrating its Instant Articles platform compatible with competing web publishing standards like Google AMP and Apple News.
The move means that publishers can build their content first in Instant Articles and then push near-identical versions of their content to other platforms.
Publishing is becoming increasingly important to major web giants such as Facebook and Google, as more people use social media as a source of news, particularly on smartphones.
“The SDK already enables developers to easily integrate publishing Instant Articles into their content management systems. By supporting a gateway to generate content across platforms, we’re also making it easy for publishers to apply some of the custom styling templates in AMP and Apple News that they have created in the Instant Articles Style Editor,” explains Facebook’s Piyush Mangalick, a partner engineering director, in a blog post. “For example the custom formats, like fonts, colors and captions, that publishers have designed in the Style Editor, will be closely mirrored in the other formats.”
“This new flexibility with Instant Articles is part of our commitment to open standards of collaboration with the community,” writes Mangalick. “Our goal is to give publishers control over extending and modifying the Instant Articles building blocks to be the best storytellers on every platform.”