Facebook tests local news feature called Today In across six US cities, combining human curation and AI to surface news, events, and announcements in its app
Context & Ripple Effects
This six-city test of Today In is the opening move in what became a year-long rebuild of Facebook's local news surface. The company paired human curators with AI ranking to fill a dedicated tab with news, events, and announcements from each city's publishers and institutions.
The arc that followed shows the bet paying off internally: within months Facebook was surfacing more local stories in News Feed worldwide, by November it had expanded Today In to 400 US cities, and by late 2019 local news had become one of four publisher categories in the standalone Facebook News test.
First-order effects
- Local publishers in the six test cities gain a new distribution channel beyond the News Feed algorithm, while residents get a single tab aggregating civic news and event announcements.
Second-order effects
- A successful test gives Facebook the data to scale Today In nationally — which it did within the year, reaching 400 cities — turning local curation from experiment into product line alongside the global News Feed change.
Third-order effects
- If the hybrid human-plus-AI curation model holds, it becomes the template for how Facebook organizes news vertically — culminating in the Facebook News test's four-category structure with local news as a first-class tier rather than feed residue.
The trend: Platforms are re-architecting news distribution around dedicated, curated surfaces — with local news as the proving ground for hybrid human-and-algorithm curation.