With Techwire, Facebook wants to be your tech news powerhouse

Like FB Newswire, Techwire is powered by Storyful, which will share newsworthy content from tech influencers on Facebook — including embeddable photos, videos and status updates that journalists can use for their own content.

Storyful, which News Corp. purchased for $25 million in December, verifies such posts for accuracy.

As with Newswire, the mission of Techwire is to raise Facebook's profile as a news dissemination vehicle.Since Twitter is better known for breaking news than Facebook, the latter is missing out on opportunities to sell advertising against real-time events. Facebook began trying to narrow the gap with Twitter with the introduction of hashtags in June 2013 and Trending Topics in January.

With 1.35 billion monthly active users, Facebook has about four times the user base of Twitter, so it actually disseminates more news. A recent Pew Research study found that more people get their political news from Facebook than any other source, except for local TV news.

With its monopoly on social media-based news, tech is a logical coverage area. In a chat with analysts last week, Twitter disclosed that it receives 554 million tech-related tweets per month. The next most-tweeted topic was food, with 66 million monthly tweets.

With Techwire, Facebook can also cast a wider net for media coverage. Newswire has gotten pickup from the BBC, The Washington Post, the New York Times and other top-tier publications and has offered timely breaking news alerts about last summer's Gaza conflict, the World Cup and the riots in Ferguson, Missouri.