For journalists, tracking what’s happening has in some ways never been easier. From Twitter to livestreams, 24-hour television news to text messages, we reporters—and everyone else—have access to more media to keep us informed than ever. But with so many ways to track stories today, there’s also just so much more to track.

Facebook wants to help journalists find the signal in the noise. The company is hoping to make it easier for reporters to surface and follow news on Facebook and Instagram as well as track down users’ reactions, photos, and videos related to news, sports, and entertainment. And now it’s created a free newsgathering tool called Signal to help journos do just that.

“Social newsgathering has been happening for a while,” says Andy Mitchell, the director of news and global media partnerships at the company. “Given the scale of Facebook, there clearly is a wealth of content available, so we wanted to build a tool to make it easier for journalists to discover new content that’s shared.”

Signal offers a dashboard where journalists can follow trending and emerging topics, track chatter around public figures on a leaderboard, and search to find public conversations, photos, or videos. Reporters can seek out stories and sources via hashtag or location on both Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. The company says that Signal will be available starting today for any journalist who requests access, from local bloggers to national TV anchors.

‘A Real Core Part’

Signal is not the first tool Facebook has made for journalists. Last week, the company began allowing journalists to broadcast live using its Mentions app. Earlier this year, Facebook launched Instant Articles to make it easier (and faster) for news lovers to read stories on their phones. Last year, the company rolled out a set of new publisher tools to help journalists better reach their audience.

But Signal is more than just another way for journalists to use Facebook. It’s a way for Facebook to show off the value of Facebook.

As more celebrities and users post news and opinions directly to the social network, Signal will allow journalists to share the public conversations with easy embed features. By helping journalists figure out what’s happening today, now, or live on Facebook, the company also appears to be encouraging journalists to gather news on Facebook—a process that at the moment still tends to be more fruitful on Twitter’s more immediate, less filtered platform. But while journalists can customize Twitter to best fit their needs, Signal will be depersonalized for now. In its initial stage, the dashboard will show similar trends and emerging topics for all of its users.

For Facebook, the power of Signal ultimately comes back to Facebook’s nearly 1.5 billion users. The company has an incentive to get every user the best stuff they want to see—and many of those people want to see news. “News is a real core part of people’s experience on Facebook,” Mitchell says. “Signal continues our investment in news more broadly and clearly journalists are very important constituents.”

By helping journalists figure out what conversations are happening on Facebook, and what ones may be happening soon, news organizations can better give the people what they want. And that means Facebook can, too.