#Facebook ain't salvation for newspapers

Unfortunately, from blindly buying into Facebook-based commenting systems rather than internally controlling commenting as part of a paywall, to thinking that "socializing" every editorial employee if not every employee of the newspaper with a corporate-backwalled Facebook account, it seems like too many newspapers are still looking for and buying into easy fixes.


The reality, though, is different.


First of all, some newspapers continue the same stupidity that got them into trouble in the first place.


For instance, if you, like many nondaily and smaller daily newspapers, have finally gotten your website paywelled, but undercut it by posting updates about breaking news stories on a regular basis to your free Facebook site, don't be surprised if a lot of people don't sign up for online newspaper subscriptions. Why should they? I wouldn't. Twitter's not quite so bad, if you keep your updates generic and link to a continually-developing version of the story on your website, behind your paywall.


The same holds true for blogging, to some degree. If you're a smaller daily, and your website isn't set up to do an internal, paywalled blog, don't set up a linked, free Blogger or Wordpress blog.


Second, if you don't have a paywalled website, Facebook isn't offering you its comment moderation services on your website out of the goodness of its heart. Rather, it's looking to:
1. Increase its demographic information about its members by seeing what they're reading, and targeting ads that way;
2. Increase its information about what ads on your website may interest them, and targeting its ads that way.


Third, Facebook appeals as much to the casual glancer as the in-depth reader. It may send a few more eyeballs to your website, but, whether that website has any sort of paywall or not, they're not likely to be very "sticky" eyeballs.

Pound #socialmedia sand down a rathole without a #paywall

OK, folks, what would you think of ...

One of the larger newspaper/media companies in America coming up with this bright idea:

Everybody in the editorial office now, including copy editors, who of course aren't out reporting stories, is  supposed to create a "personal" office FB account and Twitter account. This from a company that paywalls nothing at any of its daily papers, including multiple seven-day dailies.

It started paywalling one this spring.

Then some alleged hardcopy subscribers bitched about having to remember a password, so they dropped the paywall.

First, I suspect the paper didn't even check to see if these were hardcopy subscribers. Second, anybody knows you can reset a password. Third, after this, the paper (now becoming corporate-wide) signed up for Facebook logins to comment on stories, allegedly to make it easier to moderate offensive comment.  Which you can do even better by restricting comment to paying subscribers with a paywall!

Yet another example of how the newspaper industry continues to shoot itself in the foot.

Anyway, back to this latest directive. Beyond the copy editors not reporting stories issue, my political and religious views are 180 degrees to the third dimension diametrically opposite the place I currently happen to be. So, readers aren't going to want to read Tweets from the real me anyway.

And, speaking of "political angles," somebody at the office here created a stupid, hokey, WWI-knockoff poster about "Facebook and Twitter: It's everybody's job." Yep, 50-something regular readers will be "hooked," sure, while 20-something "leeches" will keep on leeching. That's great strategy there.

Meanwhile, via a press association website, I saw Russell Viers touted as another "guru" for how to "fix" newspapers. He's no more a guru than Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, et al. First, he says he was dead set against paywalls in the past. Then, he claims that the current NYT one - you know, the one with the Canadian hack invented for it even before it officially debuted in the U.S. - was "working." No, really.

With "gurus" like him, Rosen, et al, on the finance/business side, and being listened to, judging by posts on his blog, again, newspapers keep shooting themselves in the foot. One reader talked about "giving it away" as long as he had ads, clueless to the fact that many people use ad-blocking extensions.

UPDATE, Oct. 27: OK, the latest on this "brightness." The whippersnapper online editor at this paper, in his belief that Facebook = salvation, last Saturday, when we are shorthanded on the copy desk anyway, suggested that, if we had time, we live blog the World Series on the company's main Facebook page, complete with poll. And, he's doing it again tonight with Game 6.

Hey, "dude." People do that already. They work at Yahoo Sports and ESPN, where serious national baseball fans will go to keep up with things like that.

UPDATE, Nov. 2: Not too long after the first update on this blog, the online editor asks me (and our news editor) if we would put some sort of picture/logo (not necessarily our mugs) on our FB and Twitter corporate pages.

And I obliged -- with one version of the Green Party logo. For some reason, I was asked to take that off.

Otherwise, the whole thing seems like an attempt to reach Gen Y types who are generally plugged in, but generally ... DON'T READ NEWSPAPERS! Among other things that they've learned all too well from the tail end of Gen X.

UPDATE, Dec. 20: Oh, and add to this a news editor and assistant news editor who spell "south-southwest" as "south, southwest." Among other things.