The Fall Of Facebook Social Readers

John Herrman dissects the news about the declining popularity of social news readers on Facebook, and points out the key observation:

Sharing isn’t really sharing if you don’t mean to do it.

He also suggests that Facebook’s rejiggering of ‘trending stories’ so they are segregated and pulled to the side of actual posts by actual people could be a devastating blow to companies like the Washington Post. Ryan Kellett, the WashPo engagement producer, agrees.

No surprise that the social platform shapes discourse, but it’s a hard reality for the papers who were holding out their Facebook stats to advertisers as confirmation of a social strategy and now they are collapsing.

Here’s the crash for Washpo:

Why Free is Very Expensive - Forbes.com

Raju Narisetti via

I, for one, think that the golden age of targeted digital advertising is yet to come. Do we really want to trade that larger opportunity for the much smaller and unreliable pursuit of consumer dollars? I also wonder if we aren’t better off redeploying our newsroom resources to create new revenue streams and more engaging digital platforms than trying to make the traditional Web experience better and charge for it. And, I think we ought to create a drawbridge around our content—not necessarily for readers but for the aggregators. A business model that insists a Yahoo or a Huffington Post uses your content through some form of syndication, giving them trusted content and giving big media an opportunity to share the upside of their more engaging offerings.

Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an ‘all or nothing’ approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model. We continue to make what is being consumed—in large quantities. It is time we figured out how to make it easier, more engaging and useful.

Moving quickly to a more liquid media model is well and good. But the dominant thread of the newspaper crash is that the world doesn’t have a need to the consolidated thing that newspapers were, and it’s as yet unclear which parts of the old regional paper are still relevant.

What is the value of a local reporter? Does the local sports guy really have a better handle on the local games? Does the local reporter really understand the Arizona immigration mess better than someone in Washington? Does someone in Detroit really have better insight into the car business that someone in New York City?

Regional papers are being obliterated, blown into bits, and its not at all obvious what will still matter once the dust settles.

I think Narisetti’s still too focused on doing better at what used to matter — producing high quality works — instead of innovating around liquid media solutions. Why didn’t the Washington Post produce a Flipboard? Why did the NY Times have to spin out News.me?

The successful media companies of the future will seem more like software companies than old school publishing firms.

We’re doing this massive renovation of a very old website, it started under 1996 under “Digital Ink.” You’re taking this sort of old structure that has to put out a newspaper everyday and change its guts. People who won Pulitzer Prizes for one type of reporting, you have to teach them how to win prizes for a new kind of reporting. The biggest challenge that we’ve had is we didn’t have the tools. Now we’re connecting the conversations that are happening about the reporting are being connected right to the page. Every article page has a Twitter conversation about the reporting right next to it.

Katharine Zaleski, Executive Producer and Head of Digital News Products at the Washington Post at a Web 2.0 Expo panel. [Follow along at Capital.]

jaketbrooks: I have a feeling Zaleski is only being partially honest here. The biggest challenge she faced was probably convincing the establishment to adopt the right tools, like Twitter—and that Wash Po establishment includes the Pulitzer Prize journalists that she is purportedly training to win prizes for a different type of reporting. For every reporter that adopts Twitter, there is one who fears it. Godspeed, Ms. Zaleski.

Цензура против свободной прессы (или… Война с письмами редактору).

As just another example of old school media screwing up their attempt to gradually reinvent themselves as social media institutions, the Washington Post has disabled comments on their ombudsman’s, Deborah Howell’s blog:

[from washingtonpost.blog - The Editors Talk About Site Policies, Design and Goals]

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a shame that it’s come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it’s a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

So, instead of simply moderating the comments — all of us do that, of course — these guys move back into the pliestocene. It’s not a blog without comments, it’s not social media without dialog. Just install the plug-in guys!

[pointer from Susan Mernit, who is a really smart person, but she says “I admire the way Jim and the Post are handling this?” Huh?]

Poynter Online on Interation Isn’t Optional

More musings on the role of social in social media — which some more mainstream types refer to as interactivity:

[from The Costs and Benefits of Interaction Poynter Online]

interaction isn’t optional. Maybe it never was — an institution
that behaves arrogantly eventually reaps the whirlwind. A lot of the
anger directed against “mainstream media” comes from people who resent
the historic imbalance of power between media and so-called consumers.
At any rate, the individual empowerment made possible by the Internet
has rendered the notion of a one-way media lecture obsolete. We have to
deal with it.

it’s not a social medium if you pull out the social aspects.

But a lot of institutions — including old school media, governments, corporations — are organized around controlled access, controlled messaging, control, control, control. They don’t want to let the loonies ask questions, or snicker when someone says something stupid. Remember Mena Trott at Les Blogs, melting down when Ben Metcalfe posted “bullshit” in the IRC backchannel?

You can’t have it both ways: it’s not a social medium if you pull out the social aspects, where the “audience” can’t shout back, and the “market” can’t tell you your marketing message is laughable.

So, the Washington Post’s retreat away from the give-and-take in the wilds of the blogosphere — back into the quiet halls of the fifth estate, where our emails and letters can be filtered and flushed — is exactly that: a withdrawal from a more dynamic, participative, and egalitarian model of journalism. And if the Post and other old school players decide not to give us what we want, we can certainly find it elsewhere.