Not all news is created equal. The Pew Research Center also has charts that show what kind of news people get through Facebook and what they do with the news they access on social media. The latter shows how much news really has become a two-way conversation with the advent of the Internet and, more particularly, social media.
What we don't see on the Facebook chart is breaking news. Pew says that while other sites like Twitter are all about sharing news as it's happening, Facebook is less so. Perhaps that's at least partly because of the way people generally use Facebook — for entertainment and connecting with friends.
We've talked in class this semester about the impact that social media has on news consumption. We also know the importance of visual elements to a story, so here are a couple of charts from the Pew Research Center that demonstrate how people use social media to access news.
A personalized newspaper. That's what Greg Marra, an engineer at Facebook, calls the platform's News Feed function in a recent New York Times article. The Times story calls Marra, whose team writes the News Feed algorithms, "one of the most influential people in the news business." There's something you wouldn't have heard a decade ago. (Hmm, will he be a communications pioneer studied by some future Pro Sem class?)
About 30 percent of U.S. adults now get their news through Facebook. "The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs on Facebook's News Feed," the story said, adding:
Though other services, like Twitter and Google News, can also exert a large influence, Facebook is at the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism. Most readers now come to it not through the print editions of newspapers and magazines or their home pages online, but through social media and search engines driven by an algorithm, a mathematical formula that predicts what users might want to read. It is a world of fragments, filtered by code and delivered on demand.
One of our primary discussion points this semester has been the development of a new business model(s) by news organizations. This increasing fragmentation of how people get their information means "norgs" must incorporate both editorial and business strategies for bringing readers/viewers — and advertisers — to their websites. "All the news that's fit to print" will take on a new meaning....
