I'll facebook my news today

I’ll facebook my news today

Google is not my homepage any more – Facebook is. In fact if you’re reading this you’re likely to have gone through Facebook. I woke up and looked at my Facebook account as usual and was about to make my first trip of the day to the BBC website when I realised something had changed this morning. There was no need for my visit to the BBC.

The challengers

The news - or at least the top five stories are available in an online quiz, provided by the New York Times, in Facebook. Granted this is not total in depth news that I need to fulfil my appetite but it is the beginning of something new. The fact is I don’t need to leave Facebook to get the main news headlines.

New research shows Facebook is now bigger than MySpace. However the fastest growing social networking site is Perfspot - soon to become a banned word on Facebook. In fact I have just opened an account I can read blogs, write and publish my own articles and read news from around the world. In fact their news service is great.

For example I can get news in 31 languages on Perfspot. It is ridiculous. The site is one of easiest to navigate around and I can save an article within my account if I ever need to refer back to it that’s something the major newspapers are not offering. As social networking plays a bigger part in news provision then newspapers are likely to play a lesser role.

Should journalists be quaking in their boots?

A professional’s nightmare or opportunity?

A professional journalist should not be worried. The owner of news publishers world wide such as Rupert Murdoch’s - the news international boss – must be annoyed at the pace new media forms are taking way from the old and traditional forms of journalism. Newspaper publishers now rely on their websites to create new readers and advertising revenue as much as the newspaper creates itself.

Perfspot only had about 300,000 members in August – it has grown 756% in the last four months – but is attracting advertising from major companies. By Kodak and Yhaoo directing advertising to Perfspot it detracts from potential revenue that newspapers receive so it becomes key for a newspaper to have a contract – like the New York Times does with facebook – to generate hits from users of social networking sites.

A Murdoch newspaper, The Times, recently spent £10 million on developing its new website. Who spends that much when you don’t think internet journalism is not to be taken seriously. News international and other proprietors must take the publics demands in their stride according to Murdoch speaking to Owen Gibson form the Guardian: “It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy - not just companies but whole countries.”

Embracing the new technology

Over 6,000 users have installed the news quiz and it generates about 17,000 unique page views a week for the New York Times. However The Washington Post was the first print newspaper to join facebook. They developed an application named political compass - over 350,000 users have installed it. The application does not have links to the Washington Post website so does not generate hits but it was the beginning of a new phase in how print papers need to operate in the age of the internet.

Newspapers and their proprietors will have to accept changes in the way news is presented to us. Websites are key in bringing us news, but what if social networking sites start writing their own news? How will this affect a newspapers website? Or will it effect at all?

We can only wait and see but news on social networking sites is only just beginning and it has a long way to go before it full rivals the established news agencies.