Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the social-media giant’s decision to pay media outlets who participate in its news service will give a much-needed boost to the publishing industry and provides a model other internet companies should follow.
Multiple major news publishers from the Washington Post to Fox News to The Wall Street Journal have signed on to the service, which launched Friday with a limited test audience of 200,000 users in the U.S. and will be rolled out more broadly early next year.
Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook’s service could have a positive impact on big and small publishers alike, but can’t solve the media industry’s deep woes on its own.
“I think every internet platform has a responsibility to help fund and support news,” he said at an event in New York where he discussed the service with Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp , which owns the Journal. “Hopefully others will follow the model we are helping to set up.”
BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith said Facebook’s licensing strategy “is part of a really positive trend that will put a lot of pressure on Google and others to pay publishers.”
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Alphabet Inc. ’s Google said the company already plays a key role in helping news outlets monetize online content through the traffic its search engine sends to their sites and revenue generated through Google’s ad platforms, which most publishers rely on.
“Every month we send more than 24 billion clicks to publishers’ websites,” the statement said. “Publishers around the world can use Google tools for monetizing their content, and when they do, they receive over 70% of the ad revenue.”
Facebook has said it plans to include news from as many as 200 publications, although many won’t receive licensing fees, the Journal has reported. Among those that are paid, the fees may vary considerably. In its discussions ahead of the launch, Facebook had offered hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for smaller publishers, a few million for bigger ones, and substantially more for the very largest outlets, according to people familiar with those talks.
The move to pay for news comes as the big tech platforms have come under growing regulatory scrutiny. Google has resisted paying publishers but recently announced changes to how it ranks stories on its news page to better promote original content, addressing another long-running complaint from publishers.
The new service marked a key shift, said Mr. Thomson, who has been sharply critical of Facebook and Google in the past for issues including their opaque algorithms, digital advertising dominance and for not paying for news on their platforms.
“Great journalism will only be sustainable at scale if there is a fundamental change in the landscape like this,” he said. Mr. Thomson said Facebook’s move was “a powerful precedent that will echo around editorial departments.”
News Corp’s deal with Facebook—which covers the New York Post and Dow Jones publications such as The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s—will generate fees reaching into the double-digit millions of dollars annually, people familiar with the agreement said. A News Corp spokesman declined to comment.
Other outlets that agreed to participate include USA Today-owner, Gannett Co. , the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Condé Nast, NBC News, ABC News, Bloomberg Media, BuzzFeed News and Business Insider. Facebook hasn’t disclosed financial terms of its arrangements with publishers.
Facebook, which has been accused of bias by conservatives in the past, sought to include a diversity of viewpoints among the outlets that will be featured, although it said they must meet certain standards of trustworthiness. While the conspiracy-theory website Infowars won’t be included, headlines from far-right website Breitbart might appear.
When asked about Breitbart, Mr. Zuckerberg declined to speak about specific media sources, but said, “having someone be in there doesn’t necessarily mean the curators will choose to highlight them.”
While Facebook will have the ability to choose any headline from media outlets that have joined, only a small number would appear in the feed—some chosen by human curation and others by Facebook’s algorithms. When users click on a link within Facebook News, they will be sent to the publisher’s site.
Licensing fees have been viewed as a potentially valuable source of revenue for publishers struggling to compete for digital-ad dollars against Facebook and Google, the so-called duopoly that together commands nearly 60% of the U.S. market. Many publishers are trying to develop other revenue streams, such as user subscriptions, events and content licensing.
Earlier this year, Apple announced a partnership with more than 300 magazines and several digital media outlets and newspapers, including the Journal, for a $9.99 a month subscription news bundle called Apple News+. As part of the deal, publishers would split 50% of the revenue based on readership of their stories.
Curating a news section is a shift for Facebook, which until now has mainly been a platform for users to share news articles with each other. “People want and benefit from personalized experiences on Facebook, but we know there is reporting that transcends individual experience. We want to support both,” Campbell Brown, Facebook’s vice president for news partnerships, wrote in a blog post.
During the trial run, Facebook said it plans to showcase news from local publications in major metro areas like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington, Miami, Atlanta and Boston. The news section will eventually include news from Facebook’s local news service, Today In.
Write to Lukas I. Alpert at lukas.alpert@wsj.com