Media

Online Readership and Advertising Overtakes Print!

Chuck Ansbacher | Tuesday 15 March, 2011 13:10

Two interesting news related news morsels for you to chew on this fine morning. The first? 46% of Americans are now getting their news online, compared to 40% who aren’t. The second? There’s a guy claiming that Facebook is the largest news organisation ever.

Are these stories related? God, I hope not.

Let’s take the second story first. It strikes me as an article of faith that anyone who would refer to Facebook as a news organisation either learned everything he knows about social networking from The Social Network, or he is actively trying to enrage his readers. My guess is the latter.

In order to prove his thesis, the author does about a dozen somersaults, fumbling over himself to re-define what it is that a news organisation actually is, and how Facebook definitely is that thing. In his world, every one of my friends on Facebook is a news reporter, and they are all delivering the news to me in the form of status updates.

And wouldn’t it be amazing if that were actually the case. If every time I went to tend my Farmville (in a newsy sort of way) all of my friends were dutifully micro-reporting the hyper-local important event of the hour that was happening in their teeny little pocket of the world. Is that happening?? Is it??? For fun, I’m just going to sign into Facebook right now and take the first five status updates that appear, post them below, and let you be the judge. Here goes:

omg, 6:30 and still light out… confusing!

To shark dive or not to shark dive…

juicy j

Together wendy well live with the sadness I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul Someday girl I don’t know when were gonna get to that place Where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run…

mmm… anyone fancy picking me up at the airport tomorrow evening? :)

Obviously, that is not news. Punctuation issues aside! It is news about… my friends? Kind of? But organised? In the way that the term “organisation” would seem to delineate? Get out of here with that nonsense. And newsy? In the sense that one day it will replace newspapers? Nobody believes that, not even the guy who wrote it.

And hopefully not the people who took the survey that first news story is based on. Remember that one? About how more people are getting their news online than anywhere else? I’ll bet you a lobster dinner they weren’t including Facebook in their list of accepted news sources.

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