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As someone who has been running a local newspaper for the last four years in a town of about 11 thousand people, getting money or support from Facebook would fe
by zoul 8y ago
As someone who has been running a local newspaper for the last four years in a town of about 11 thousand people, getting money or support from Facebook would feel like someone robbing you and then being so kind as to split the money with you. My trust in them is exactly zero.
They have practically monopolized news distribution, helped to destroy the business model of an important social service and now they would like to make up for it by giving a fraction of the money back?
- freehunter 8y agoI also run a local news outlet, digital-only though and not print. Facebook is both the reason for our success and also the source of our biggest pain. They almost put us out of business within the last year. For how they're helping, it's really hard to get people to care about websites. People as a whole just don't care. They don't want to visit your website. So we publish our stories and share them to Facebook. We get about a 10% click through of people who saw the story, which is better than we'd do without publishing to Facebook. On the other hand, our biggest draw is the event calendar, organizing all of the city and business events into one local calendar. People visit for the events, and then also click on news headlines they find interesting. Up until April 2018, we got this event data from the Facebook events API and linked it all back to Facebook if people wanted more details. A win-win I think. In April 2018, they shut off the events API with zero warning. So these public events from businesses who want people to attend their events, events which are visible by people who are not even logged into Facebook, are now considered private data by Facebook and no longer part of their API. The big draw of aggregating them is that people see a curated list of good events that are actually near them: in a small town, just clicking Discover on Facebook events shows you mostly stuff from the big cities nearby. It takes a few clicks to get to events actually happening in the small town itself. We still have it, but we have to type it all by hand every week, which leaves less time for writing stories, talking to story leads and city officials and customers, selling ads, you know the actual "local news" part of the business. Facebook, if you're reading this and want to help local news: turn the public events API back on. A local band playing at my local brewery is not private information, it is the definition of "things that should be shared".
- steve-benjamins 8y agoThat’s interesting- would you be willing to share your publication? I’d love to check it out.
- freehunter 8y agoIt's very closely tied to my real-world identity so I'm not comfortable linking it here at this time. It's only interesting to the people living in/around my small town, to anyone else it would just look like a generic small town news website full of unimportant small-town topics.
- exotree 8y agoAre you capturing these folks from FB through email sign-ups? Have seen a couple local news orgs successfully get people to visit their site directly by investing in email.
- freehunter 8y agoI have a call-to-action on every page asking people to sign up for the newsletter, but the number of people who actually do that are so insignificant that it doesn't matter. Over the past year I've had about two dozen signups, compared to 15,000 people hitting the site. I haven't explored more of the popular avenues for this though, things like "if the mouse moves to close the tab, show a pop up asking for a signup". It might convert but it's not something I'm comfortable doing at this point.
- baddash 8y agoWhy did they shut off the API? Any reason given?
- freehunter 8y agoIt was just the catch-all "we're reducing the personal data visible through our API". Nothing specific to the events API. Which would make sense if it restricted the ability to see how many people were going and who had RSVP'd, but they shut off everything. When I asked Facebook support, they gave me two options: direct users to the Facebook Local app (bypassing my site), or have every business I wanted to collect event data from log into my site and store their user access token, and that would give me permission to collect their events. This token needs to be re-upped every so often, so now I'm asking hundreds of people to log into my site every month just to keep their events populating. Most of the business owners can barely use Facebook to begin with, it's just a non-starter.
- dqpb 8y agoThank you for explaining the incentive behind the media-blitz against Facebook.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chillacy 8y agoIt's not guilt that's giving money back as much as the fact that they need content producers at the end of the day. If you guys got smart about it you might be able to do something like collective bargaining against the giant, assuming the services you offer are irreplaceable by non-journalists.
- baddash 8y agoMonopolized news distribution? How so? Aren't there many sites which provide news such as reddit, Twitter, Hacker News ;) etc?
- zoul 8y agoCan’t speak for others, but we would have no chance distributing our content digitally on Twitter or Hacker News. Or even RSS and mailing lists. We strive to find other ways, but sharing on Facebook and paying for eyeballs seems to be the only realistic option at the moment.