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.

I was never a fan of Facebook, nor, I believe, that I will ever be. However, this doesn’t mean that I do not acknowledge the importance of this social media platform for journalists.

Most press officers of various government institutions use Facebook to communicate information related to their activities and so do companies, research groups and think thanks. Therefore, journalists can connect to these profiles and receive information in real-time. This goes beyond interpersonal interaction when the average user hooks up to another just to see his or her photos or whatever else. Checking Facebook has become an important part of a journalist’s daily activity – and this is also available for Twitter.

In Zimbabwe, however, it seems that the government has another opinion. In consequence, the government has banned the use of Facebook for all employees of the state controlled Zimbabwe Newspaper Group during work hours. Journalists may now check their profiles only after 5PM.

“Its unfair given that most of people no longer use e-mails to communicate. As journalists we  need  to  research and  its  through the face book and  other  sites that  we  get  back  ground information for  our  stories. This  is  the  reason  why  we  end  up writing  half baked stories because we would  have  nor researched,” said a journalist working for the Zimbabwean Herald.

Foster Dongozi, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists said that “It’s silly to make such restrictions in this era of modern information technology.”

Indeed it is. Journalists now risk missing vital information.