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LinkedIn is rolling out a trending topics section

LinkedIn pulls a Facebook.

Obama Participates In Linkedin Town Hall
Obama Participates In Linkedin Town Hall
Stephen Lam / Getty Images

LinkedIn is known for helping people find their next job, but now it wants to help people find their news, too.

On Wednesday, the professional network is rolling out a “Trending” topics feed, a new section of the app where users can find a collection of recent news stories and accompanying user posts that are personalized based on their interests and profession.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn will use a combination of human editors and computer algorithms to detect important storylines, then collect articles and posts related to those storylines and put them into individual feeds. The product looks very similar to what Facebook does with its own trending topics section, and is somewhat similar to Twitter’s Moments feature.

The obvious hope here is that better news curation will give users more incentive to spend time inside the app, where LinkedIn can make money from other products like sponsored posts or sponsored jobs. (LinkedIn won’t include sponsored posts inside the trending section at launch.)

But news curation can be difficult, as Facebook learned last summer when a Gizmodo report claimed the social network was censoring some conservative news sites. Facebook denied the report, but spent a good portion of the year tweaking its trending section to fight off the perception that its trending topics feature is biased.

Apparently, LinkedIn was paying attention. The company has an actual editor in chief, former Fortune managing editor Dan Roth, who makes editorial decisions about what constitutes news. Facebook does not have the same kind of top-editor role for making major content decisions.

Roth also says that he and his team of more than 20 editors at LinkedIn want the new trending section to include diverse perspectives, not just storylines and posts that align with a user’s existing beliefs.

“No matter what you do in life, you need to know more than what’s just going on in your [world],” he explained. “This is a must-have for professionals.”

The new feature rolls out on Wednesday to U.S. users on both mobile and desktop.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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