If you ask kids today why they are not on Facebook their standard answer is because their parents and grand parents ruined it for them, so they went to Snapchat.
Facebook is a giant in the social media landscape and is starting to hit a wall to try to get bigger and the Russian hacking has slowed their efforts to be more credible.
I recently had a chance to sit down with Alex Hardiman who is in charge of Facebook’s local news initiative.
The conversation consisted of her telling me about efforts to revive the site’s credible news feed in the wake of the Russia investigation which has led to of many users admitting to distrust in what they are reading or even Facebook fatigue. This predicament was the catalyst for them to roll out their news feed product they call Feed.
Feed is centered around local, trustworthy, meaningful content. Hardiman commented on how valuable local papers are to this new initiative. She said because most local papers are writing meaningful, local content that matters to residents’ lives, the company wants to promote that content on peoples’ pages and reward the creators for their efforts.
She said founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks Feed will help stem the tide of Facebook’s current Russian issue while walking back their mantra of taking ad dollars away from newspapers and now work with them. She explained the Feed product looks for content on the site that fits the trustworthy parameters set up and promotes it on users’ pages that have liked the stories or have friends that liked the stories.
The J-T has done an about face on Facebook and currently embraces it, where in years past we avoided it. The Journal-Tribune has had a consistent social media strategy that calls for us to post snippets of stories on our page so people that don’t subscribe to the J-T know where we are and what we are writing about. From there we have let the aggregators like Facebook scrape our content and funnel users back to our website. This has allowed us to keep in touch with the entire community more often and tell the area’s growth story.
Many times we get questions about our strategy and why we don’t post the entire articles for free. Our simple answer is that the reporters that gather the news deserve to be paid for their time so we ask the users to pay for the news.
Because our site has more than 30 million page views we are upgrading it so local residents or those wanting to know more about the happenings in Marysville and Union County can get it.
We are in the process of loading all our stories on our website in their entirety for subscribers to access. We will also be adding the ability for visitors to the site to buy single stories, as well as the archives, so they can pay for just what they want to read.
In the next three years, as we head into the 200th anniversary of Marysville and Union County, we feel our efforts are now more important than ever to continue to record the history of our town and be the credible, local news source that the taxpayers and residents have trusted for the past 169 years.