Journalist Arriving on Facebook
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
On April 5th, Facebook announced a new Facebook page called "Journalist on Facebook" that is designed and dedicated to helping journalist use Facebook as a reporting tool.
Last fall Facebook announced a similar page called Facebook and Media. So, you think "Well, it's the same thing right?" Not exactly. Just as the title says the page Facebook for Media is geared towards just media.
On the other hand, Journalist on Facebook is all for and about the individual journalist. It's main existence is to help journalist use the power of Facebook for journalism.
It does this with Facebook-provided best practices and peer collaboration from a big community of journalism professionals.
It seems that Facebook took the time to make this page a worthwhile experience. They have polling and discussion options that will grow in activity, video interviews with top journalist, and even a registration tab to be notified of journalist meetups in local areas. They even give you a nice "Get Started" guide to help new journalist.
Now, it may be easy to assume journalist know how to use social media and if they're using Twitter they probably do, but this new way of using Facebook goes beyond Twitter and offers more opportunities for journalist in general.
This is just a great chance to learn from other journalist giving more innovation and great content to use. Journalist can promote their content, become even more independent, and accumulate their fan base.
In my opinion, this is just a win-win situation for everyone and especially for journalist. Some people believe that this is just Facebook finding a way to compete more with Twitter, but is that really a bad thing if they are?
What do you think? Is Facebook just doing this for competition? Can Facebook be a good resource for Journalist?
Photo Credit: iloubnan.info via Creative Commons
3 comments:
I think this is great! It will undoubtedly increase exposure to important issues, since many people using Facebook may be part of the same crowd that rarely picks up a newspaper (our age bracket!). I can't wait to check it out. I agree with you when you say that competition is not a reason to degrade the efforts of Facebook-- the more coverage we get of important issues, and the more people those issues and reports reach, the better! Journalists would probably be reaching a huge, untapped audience.
Journalism was always going to move to Facebook someday. This is a great way for younger people to keep up with journalism news, and a great way for journalists to reach new audiences with their work.
This is a perfect networking tool that college journalism students should take absolute advantage of.
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