Is Facebook the future of blogs? One local news blog seems to think so. According to the Washington Post, rockvillecentral.com, a website focusing on local news in Rockville, MD, has ditched its website in favor of existing solely on Facebook.
This is not the same thing as if a major news source – let’s say, the Washington Post – went all-online. Rockville Central is almost a template for a feature story on web community journalism: a volunteer staff, servicing a city of 61,000 people, and focusing on local issues. It is a model that has been touted by some as the next step in journalism, filling in the local holes while major news sites cover the Big Issue stories.
Sites like Facebook and Twitter are a huge part of this model. Ordinarily, they work as the syndication method for news, letting people know that the stories exist. They are the next-generation RSS feed, the one even your grandmother can figure out, because everything shows up nice and easy in the same place where she gets her photos of the grandkids.
There is obviously a lot of appeal to hosting a site purely on Facebook. With an active membership greater than the population of the United States, there is an enormous user base that can be reached. According to Facebook’s ad statistics, of the 61,000 people living in Rockville, 37,660 of them over the age of 18 are on Facebook. Include people living in a 10 mile radius and the number jumps to 110,660. The reach is incredible.
As a singular platform, however, Facebook has issues. Issues that, ironically, Twitter doesn’t have, but Twitter lacks the functionality of Facebook that would allow you to even imagine running a service like this. It comes down to two things – privacy and format.
As much as privacy advocates like to complain about Facebook, it is a fairly walled-off service. There is no way for a community page to reach out to anyone that does not like their page. Unless someone that already likes the page shares the article, there is no way to reach out. With Twitter, there are always hashtags and mentions, in addition to retweets, to spread a message, but not on Facebook. Not that anyone could run a news outfit on Twitter, unless they were cool with running one-to-two sentence stories, but the less privacy allows for greater reach.
The privacy problem also infects any archival material on the site. Yes, everything you put up on Facebook is up there forever. But have you ever tried to search for something specific? It’s a nightmare. The only reliable way to find that embarrassing post someone made a couple months ago is to keep clicking “Older Posts” until you get there. Now, imagine you’re trying to find a specific article about a city council meeting where a sales tax to repair street lights was raised .5 percent.
Then there is the functionality issue. This is Facebook, not MySpace. You are locked into their format. Depending on a how a site operates, that might not be that big an issue. Facebook’s design is relatively clean and simple, but it also means a site is never going to get any ad revenue.
The only benefit I can see behind the move to all-Facebook at this moment is Rockville Central does not have to pay for website costs. Even if the entire population of Rockville is reading Rockville Central, that is still not a huge expenditure. Everything else seems to be motivated by laziness. All the benefits the site gets out of posting on Facebook, they also get just by posting on Facebook. Cutting off their website just means that is one less way they can get readers. It may work for Rockville Central in the short run, because they were the first to do it and they are getting the publicity for it. But the next site that tries it, all they are doing is cutting off a way for people to read their material. It should be available everywhere – website, Facebook, Twitter, any aggregation site you can think of, RSS feeds… yelling really loudly. The time it takes to cross post is negligible, and it makes it that much more likely someone is actually going to read what has been written.
Given Facebook’s willingness to alter its structure, this may not always be the case. I could see Facebook doing something to be more accommodating to ideas like those of the staff of Rockville Central. But right now? It is the equivalent of deciding that a crowded room is too noisy, so you are just going to stand in a corner and talk. You may feel more isolated, but no one is going to hear you any easier.
Most websites with a decent amount of traffic also run ads, so they make a little money back on running the site. It’s what keeps a lot of content free. Going entirely to FB would knock out that potential revenue source, because I doubt that FB is interested in revenue sharing.
There’s something about that in the middle of the article. Actually, I could potentially see Facebook changing how things worked if they thought they could make this a trend, and if they could further monetize off it. But the way things are right now, all it does is offer them free hosting in a trade off for no search capability.