Interesting move here from Facebook which is hiring more journalists. It has has just gone out and hired a managing editor in the form of Bloomberg journalist Dan Fletcher to be the company’s managing editor leading some to speculate the social network has increasingly larger plans for online news.

At present Facebook doesn’t have a news department, but Fletcher is one of several journalist to join Facebook after Vadim Lavrusik joined from Mashable last year to head its “journalist program” and Andrew Noyes joined from National Journal’s CongressDaily.

The speculation is that Fletcher could be working on something along the lines of what Dan Roth does at LinkedIn where the former Fortune journalist is in charge of the professional social network’s news aggregation product, which is called LinkedIn Today:

“Another source tells us that Facebook could be looking at LinkedIn’s LinkedIn Today as a possible model. Fletcher graduated from Northwestern University in 2009, where he majored in journalism. Prior to Bloomberg, he worked as special projects editor at Time,” Business Insider reports.

This seems to make sense and would see Fletcher working on a new Facebook news product.  This would could bring together the top stories on the social network as it looks to take advantage of the fact that twice as many get their news via Facebook than they do Twitter and it is an increasingly important way for many to share and read news. It functions in part as a Social RSS Reader.

It is overdue move for Facebook to create something on the site that focuses on news and gives all of this news traffic and attention it gets a focus.

Whatever the case writing pieces questioning Facebook’s privacy policies (Facebook’s Future: Less Privacy with Open Graph?) didn’t harm Fletcher’s career.