Twitter to soon stream news 24/7 courtesy of Bloomberg

Fake news, meet real news. Social media has recently come under fire for its role in the spread of fake news, and various networks have tried to address the problem in different ways. Twitter seems to have opted to fight fake news by increasing the amount of its real news content. That will be via a soon to be announced partnership with Bloomberg, which, among other things, is expected ti bring in the ad revenues Twitter is in dire need of.

Streaming "news" isn't exactly new to Twitter and it has made partners in the past, Bloomberg as well, to deliver blow by blow accounts of events as they happen. The most recent was last season's Thursday night NFL games, before that was snatched up by Amazon.

This Bloomberg Twitter channel is different in one important way. Whereas previous news streaming on Twitter covered one-off or at most seasonal events, this will be the first time Twitter will be delivering the news 24 hours a day, 7 day a week. This could quickly surpass Twitter's record 800 hours of broadcasted events just in the first quarter of this year.

It is almost a match made in heaven. Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith notes that today's viewers already do a kind of multimedia juggling with news, watching news on TV while simultaneously posting opinions on Twitter. This partnership simply takes that activity to the next level. But rather than simply parroting what has already been reported on Bloomberg's channels, the Twitter channel will be posting live, original content from the company's bureaus worldwide.

The partnership, however, will perhaps benefit Twitter the most. For the first time since going public, the social media giant has reported a decline in revenue. While it remains one of the biggest social networks, it has failed to turn that into profit. So far, video ads have been its biggest source of revenue, but it is a market that increasingly favors YouTube and, more recently, Facebook. Of course, this Bloomberg Twitter news channel will be ad-supported.

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal