You Are What You Read

"'Facebook Friend #384' read 'My Parents Turned Down Harry Potter Role: Daniel Radcliffe' on Washington Post Social Reader"

"'Facebook Friend #1276' read 'The World Mourns the Death of Dippin' Dots' on Yahoo!"

You may have seen similar postings to these popping up on your Facebook News Feed over the past couple of months. And, if you have lots of current events gurus as friends, you might be getting a little annoyed at seeing everything they read.

However, according to Facebook, this "frictionless sharing" is helping news organizations reach many new readers.

Jeff Sonderman from Poynter.com shares some lessons that Facebook and news organizations have learned since implementing these news apps in September.

First, early statistics show that these "frictionless sharing" apps have increased traffic to news sites from Facebook referrals. Yahoo News has 10 million app users on Facebook and its referrals from the social media site have increased 600 percent. The Washington Post and The Guardian are also seeing strong success with 3.5 and 4 million monthly users respectively.

Second, the struggle with finding young readers may be decreasing. According to Facebook, 83 percent of Social Reader users are 35 years or younger. This is good news to news organizations as they are appealing to a wider range of people.

Last, while no one seems to know Facebook's tricky algorithm for deciding which stories appear in one's News Feed, one thing is for certain: the open graph apps appear heavily within the News Feed, meaning that your friend's reading habits are consistently available.

Despite some criticism and leeriness over the inclusion of news reading on Facebook, I think that this is a great thing for news organizations as it is pulling in a wide variety of people to their website. Whether they read just one article or are drawn to the entire website, people that were getting no news before are receiving news via their social media habits.

We gain opinions and reccommendations from those in our sphere of influence and this is another way to help us decide what to read or what we may find interesting.

Or, you could just judge your friends on their own reading habits. As they (don't) say, you are what you read!

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Become Friends With Your Computer

When making friends, it's important to learn about their particular qualities. If you really want to get close to a friend, you must figure out what's inside of them as well. Be friends with your computer.


Instead of taking everything you see on the screen for granted, learn to change and edit webpages to your liking.


Journalists will increasingly find the need for skills that computer science departments are teaching.


The article, "Hack Into Hackers," by Nicholas Carlson, points out that it's the new journalist's job to learn "enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation." Basically to do everything that is involved with being a journalist.


Because of the evolving news world, journalists aren't sticking to one area of reporting. Traditional news jobs are going to becoming less prevalent where internet blogs and microblogging sites are gaining on their audiences.


In the reading, "technology firms like Yahoo and Google" are mentioned as examples of how man, technology and journalism have teamed up to make a power trio.

HTML codes can be used to do just about anything on the internet from editing a YouTube video to making your very own webpage.


By learning how to code on the  computer, you can more easily brand yourself as a journalist and improve your search engine optomization.


Being a new journalist means a more demanding workload and a whole new set of skills required to even begin the job. It is necessary now and will become more necessary in the future to aquire these and various other computer skills to be successful.


Get comfortable in your seat and give your computer a name because in no time you'll be making great friends.

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Newspaper Circulation Still Declining

Newspaper circulation is still falling according to Monday's figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations as reported in The Huffington Post.

Overall circulation is down 8.7 percent, for the period October 1,2009 through March 31, 2010 compared to that same period last year. Circulation for Sunday papers is down 6.5 percent.

Free news on the Web is still considered a factor. Publishers have increased subscription costs to adjust for lost advertising revenue and of course others have stopped or reduced delivery in certain areas.

The Top 25 newspapers in the country showed major losses.

• The Washington Post is down 13.1 percent; 8.2 percent down on Sundays.


• USA Today lost 13.6 percent - partially contributed to the slump in travel because it is popular in hotels and airports. It is now at the number two spot.


• The Wall Street Journal had a gain of .5 percent and now has the highest circulation at 2.09 million as it surpassed USA Today as the top newspaper. Although this is somewhat misleading because looser auditing standards allows it to count its digital online replica in the subscription count. In essence providing a double count. The Journal's paid online circulation rose by 31,000 offsetting the printed editions decline of 20,000.


• The New York Times has the third highest circulation at 951,063, which is a 8.5 percent decline.


• The San Francisco Chronicle is down 23 percent.

The Wall Street has launched a metro edition in New York City to compete even more agressively with The Times, its biggest competitor in the region.

The president of the Newspaper Association of America, John Sturm, says that you can't judge the industry by these declining numbers, because more and more people are turning to the Web for their news and 100 million adults still say they read a newspaper daily and 168 million read news in print or online daily.

These facts and figures help to paint a clearer picture of the state of the newspaper industry and how it is affecting journalism. I don't know that I would refer to it as a death spiral for the newspapers because people are still reading the news; where they are getting it has changed.

There are just so many options available. It is apparent that the business model has to change as we have heard from various sources throughout the BNR course. Perhaps charging for access does make sense in some instances. I also agree with the idea of public funding to protect the integrity of journalism and insure that students who want to go into journalism for the love of writing and reporting get the opportunity to do so without living in poverty due to thier chosen career.

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Yahoo Puts its Comment Feature Back Up

After three years, Yahoo News has decided to reinstate the comment feature to its stories.

In an article by Joseph Tartakoff, Yahoo says that the decision to pull comment boards off the site was made in 2006 because of "poor quality of discussion". The company has added filters this time to try and keep quality comments at the top and control offensive ones.

But why did Yahoo News make the decision to put comment boards back up in the first place? Mark Walker, head of Yahoo News in North America, said users basically demanded it.

“We sort of looked at our customer satisfaction research and some of the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their first amendment rights,” he says.

People are already using this right to its full extent on the site, with one story having more than 2,200 comments on it.

This is just more proof that news consumers have a lot of say in what the future of the media will look like.

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