Bing announced today that it has launched a new section for the Bing sidebar to showcase journalists, writers and authors of news stories. Now, when you search for any given topic on Bing, along with the Facebook-powered social results, you’ll see stuff from authors who have discussed the topic.

I suppose this is Bing’s response to Google’s authorship (which Google is indicating will become a more powerful signal in the future). Instead of integrating the results into the central search experience, however, Bing has elected to showcase authors to the side.

“Bing’s sidebar helps connect you to these types of people; people who are knowledgeable on the topic you’re searching for including friends you know and experts and enthusiasts you may or may not be familiar with,” says Nathan Penner, Senior Program Manager for the Bing News Team. “Now, when you search for a topic, authors who frequently write articles related to your query will appear alongside other experts and enthusiasts in the sidebar. Hover over the person’s name to learn more about them, see their top articles related to your query, or link to their Twitter page.”

“While the sidebar provides a summary for some authors, you’ll see a link to “See all articles” which takes you to that author’s articles related to your query right in Bing. We’re just beginning to surface the countless number of authors out there to build this feature, so while we won’t have author pages for everyone, we’re hard at work to grow our coverage so stay tuned.”

Bing doesn’t mention any markup for authors to implement the way Google does. It does appear to be relying primarily on Twitter for its author info. The bios (at least for the ones I looked at) are drawn from Twitter, and a lot of them include recent tweets. Some also include Klout scores.

Speaking of which, Bing and Klout just announced a partnership last week. Clearly, Bing is looking to make as much use of it as possible.