The Guardian, Facebook and open journalism
The Nieman Journalism Lab had this interview with Alan Rusbridger on their website last week.
Apart from mentioning that pursuing a paywall “doesn’t seem the most interesting thing to be doing at the moment,” Rusbridger’s comments on Facebook and the Guardian’s digital strategy were particularly interesting.
As Peter Preston mentions at the end of this Observer piece, Facebook’s April redesign of how you are notified which articles your friends are reading (from a five-article alert to a single trending headline stream) caused the readership of the Washington Post app to hemorrhage over 8m readers in 30 days.
The Guardian’s Facebook app has 4m monthly users but also suffered a drop in usage. This indicates the potential power the social network may have over how news organisations collect their traffic.
However, the charts below (from insidefacebook.com), demonstrate that not every social reader suffered the same fate following the redesign. Yahoo, MTV, Mashable and ESPN all saw increases in monthly active users.
Rusbridger believes the Facebook app is evidence of “a very powerful thing: that we’re not hung up on all the content being on the Guardian site.” This relaxed approach to funneling traffic to their homepage is evident in their 2010 decision to build an open API, which has since led to a number of both new and established media companies, including Google, experimenting with their content.
Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news, suggested in a recent talk at Harvard that newspapers are doomed unless they can adapt to the web. He warned though, that such adaptation doesn’t simply mean implementing the iPad as “the road home to their magazine format, subscription model and expensive full-page ads.”
iPads, paywalls and revenue streams aside, the recent convergence of media organisations with powerful search engines and social networks is promising, but presents an interesting question. How will those media organisations persuade readers to pay for Guardian/Telegraph-stamped bundles of content, when that content isn’t natively seen in bundle-form by the search engines and social networks that represent such a large proportion of the readership?
