Facebook’s changes and college media: appification on the way?
September 23, 2011 in College Media, industry news, social media
Some of the biggest news in social media the past two days has been the announcement by Facebook of a whole passel of new features, changes to their interface, and ways for news media to interact with the Facebook mob of users (now around 700 million).
There’s more coverage in the tech blogging/press universe than I could possibly link to, although I’m including some links at the bottom of this post if you’re interested.
photo via GigaOm
The big change for users will be the Timeline. But for media operations, the big change is in the application space. Several large media outlets – Washington Post and the Guardian UK among them – debuted new “social reading” applications. These applications allow you to read articles within the Facebook interface and then notify your Facebook acquaintances as to what you’ve been reading.
Now why do I think this is going to be important for college media? Perhaps an illustration is in order. I’ll pick on a large media outlet like The State News at Michigan State.
Let’s say they develop a Facebook app like the ones listed above. Facebook users can then allow that app to hop into their newsfeed (or whatever they’re calling it this week at Facebook). When one of The State News’ readers reads an article in Facebook, a link to that article will be shared with that user’s friends, which may push more readers into The State News app, and bring in a wider connection to the paper’s online content.
From what I’ve read, the media outlets are able to sell advertising in the app outside Facebook’s advertising platform (from the Guardian story above), so there’s added value for online advertisers.
And as much as I talk about developing web sites, it’s pretty obvious that a huge number of college students spend a lot of time in Facebook. And getting content in front of college students’ eyes (especially online) is always a challenge when college newspaper readership remains committed to the print edition.
Will college media outlets do this? It’s too early to tell. I’m aware of some outlets that have been using Facebook pages for a social media presence. This is a slightly different paradigm, and totally new on the radar. But I’ve already seen information on my FB page about what articles people are reading on the Washington Post Social Reader. It’s worth experimenting with, at least, as a way to expand the reach of your digital footprint.
Related articles
- Facebook as Media Hub: Shortcomings and Worries – PCWorld (news.google.com)
- Three New Social News Reading Apps for Facebook: WSJ, The Guardian, and Washington Post (offonatangent.blogspot.com)
- ‘We wanted to make ourselves more Facebookey’, says Guardian (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
- Media companies revisit their AOL days with Facebook (gigaom.com)
As student journalists master the different ways social media can be used to report news and strengthen a publication, tools such as Twitter, Facebook and personal blogging can play an important role in nabbing a job or internship.
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One way not to do online comments (rant)
July 16, 2010 in Community, ethics, industry news, management, social media
Over the life of this blog, and in my studies of the online news business since 2001, I have seen so many efforts to rein in online comments that my eyes roll when I see a new round of pearl-clutching from news editors and publishers about how nasty commenters are on their web sites.
But of all the efforts, this effort by the Sun Chronicle in Massachusetts has got to be the prize-winner for ways to kill off a commenting community. The SC not only wants readers to register to comment using their real names and addresses, they want users to give up credit card information and pay a one-time fee of 99 cents for the privilege!
Look, I can understand the desire to have a well-functioning, civil community of readers commenting on your web site. I can even understand the desire to have people use their real names when commenting (although I disagree). But demanding that readers give up sensitive financial information and then billing them just to leave a comment on a web site is … well, I can’t use the words I’m considering right now on a family web site.
Of course, if the Sun Chronicle were serious about wanting comments, they could use Facebook Connect. It’s not 100 percent foolproof, but it would tie a comment to a user’s online identity in a more meaningful way and discourage or eliminate “anonymous” comments (pro-tip: when a user puts a name – even a made-up name – in a comment box, it’s not technically “anonymous,” but “pseudonymous”).
More likely, this change will drop the Sun Chronicle’s commenting community to near zero. And if I were an enterprising web denizen in one of the paper’s communities, I’d be busy putting up a web site that allows users to comment on SC-related articles without registering. Just provide headline links to SC stories in blog posts and allow comments on those posts. No need to steal content.
I’ve often gotten the vibe that a vast number of news media professionals hate comments, and would rather not deal with them at all. After all, people on the Internet can be real jackasses when their name is not associated with what they write.
But shutting off comments on your site – or trying to get people to pay to do so – is no real solution. It just drives people to other places on the Internet where they can comment without fearing for their jobs, or their social status, or whatever.
Last year, Va. Tech’s Collegiate Times student newspaper went through a similar type of situation. A campus committee was dismayed that there were racist comments showing up in the comments on the Collegiate Times’ web site. So the committee’s solution was to try to get the news org. to stop allowing anonymous comments by cutting off university funding.
Brilliant!
No mention of, you know, actually dealing with the disgusting underbelly of racism that brings these comments out. Just sweep the problem under the rug so the campus community looks pristine.
The truth of the matter is that managing an online community of commenters is work. It’s like tending a garden. If you don’t put in the work to root out the weeds (abusive commenters), you won’t get the vegetables (cogent commenters) to flourish.
The Sun Chronicle‘s recently announced policy roots out the weeds by digging up the entire garden.
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Tags: anonymity, comments, Community, Facebook Connect, Website
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