Vlad Jecan

Editor’s Weblog mentions an interesting report that suggests that people on Facebook prefer to link to broadcast sites, such as YouTube, to newspaper websites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  Google News, on the other hand, sends more traffic to newspapers.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal received 10.37% of its US visits from Google News, while it only received 1.41% of its visits from Facebook. The New York Times also received more visits from Google News than Facebook, with 5.21% and 2.96% of visits respectively.

This does not come as a surprise, however. Facebook is basically intended for online social interaction, media (images, videos) sharing, and offers various entertainment focused services. Therefore, it comes only naturally that users link to broadcast sites. Perhaps only a small percentage of Facebook users use their profile to follow newspapers and other online publications.

Google News is exactly the opposite. As we all know, Google unleashes its bots to index content based websites – from newspapers to blogs – to rank them and so on. People visit the aggregator’s site to seek information and their search results will, in most cases, send them to the better indexed online publications. In the same time, Facebook and Google News have complete different profiles. The first is entertainment and the later is information.

Will Facebook send more traffic to newspapers in the future? Questionable. However, I would like to see a similar analysis of Twitter and Google News.

A post by Elizabeth Redman got my attention. She asks: “Will coding become the next indispensable skill [for journalists]?” Or should journalists write not only articles but software as well?

Indeed, it has become imperative for journalists to be comfortable with social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and other. However, coding is not compulsory for using social networking and perhaps journalists can survive without knowing PHP. The part with “finding out information and building a platform to express it in new ways” does not require coding abilities. If it’s about the content, then a writer can set up a free blog on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress.com and publish materials in no time.

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Pupils at the Holden Lane High School in Sneyd Green, UK, wrote papers on various aspects of the web. Some of them focused on cyber bullying and others examined how websites blocked by the school, like Facebook, MySpace and others, can be useful.

Kieran Minshall, aged 14, from Milton, said: “I have written about how websites like Facebook are blocked and how we could use them to help with our work.

“I’ve never had any experience of cyber bullying or anything like that. I can understand why certain websites are blocked, but I think we could use them in a positive way.