Something I wrote about at length a bit more than two years ago is the use of social media to find news about friends rather than traditional news.
See my December 2010 blog.
Since then, I have visited traditional news sites less and less. The news site I refer to in that blog post was somewhere I visited daily (and had done for five years or so) but it doesn’t even register on the Chrome list of sites I visit often.
Why the change?
I guess there are three reasons:
i) The type of content I am interested in is now on Facebook – so any person / group / issue I care about (from pop star to football team to climate change) have users I follow who post content – quite often daily. So I can read updates from the source of the news for them.
ii) Any other news, particularly breaking news, appears in Facebook streams pretty quick – I heard about the pope abdicating on Facebook and the meteorite hit in Russia via Twitter. Anything which comes up can be verified by a Google search and clicking on the first reputable news source it brings up.
iii) The radio station where I live, and the local print newspaper, each have Facebook streams and post reasonably regularly, so any local news appears in my stream (no need to buy a paper anymore as they are giving it away in another medium) and if it is of interest I take a look.
The future of news appears to be social. Quite how money is made from that, I am unsure.
I am frustrated by the Murdoch pay wall, as content from their cannot be shared (or if it can, it would seem only with other subscribers – feel free to tell me if I am not understanding how that works correctly) as far as I can tell it is working out for him, but his news output is not coming my way online.
Edd Keating 