Facebook Journalism: Helpful but Overblown?

This is a response to something that was not really the main part of Colin's post:  "I wanted to transition over the Facebook this week partly because it has gigantic implications for the legacy journalists"


I don't think Facebook itself has gigantic implications for old-school journalists.  Maybe it could in the future, with some significant changes, but for now, I think it has some newsgathering advantages, but is far short of a game changer.


FaceBook (and other social networking sites) can be useful for newsgathering:  They provide a new way to try to find a specific person, beyond old (early 2000's) methods of looking someone up in an online phonebook, Googling him or her  with their home town as one of the search terms, or searching the web sites of organizations they are associated with.    Social networking sites frequently provide local television news, and other media, with a way to get photos of people they are doing stories on.  Watch this video from WFSB, for an example.  


But Facebook has a number of limitations as a newsgathering and dissemination tool.


First, for news distribution, there seems to be no economic model to sustain it.  Facebook seems to be a private version of the entirely public space of the internet.  The Internet is the town green, Facebook is the mall.  Because Facebook is a private space, it controls the ads, and keeps the revenue.  The mall and Facebook exist to make money, not to provide a forum for public debate.  The public forum is the town green, or the internet.   At least some of Facebook's guts are open source.  Perhaps a non-profit version could solve this, and reduce the site's propensity for gathering personal information, presumably as a way of making money?


Media organizations that have presences on Facebook (CNN, Los Angeles Times,) often simply post a collection of links to stories back on their own web sites, in hopes of driving traffic to those sites, where CNN and the LA Times sell the advertising.  Although Facebook's design allows for efficient transmission of news through feeds, the money is not there to support original, Facebook-only news operations.  Unless somebody comes up with an as-yet-unforseen way to pay for it.


On the news gathering side, the improvement in contacting sources is only incremental.  Facebook just the latest in a long line of tools that make it easier for people and groups to go online (and to be found easily by journalists).  A few years ago, MySpace was the spot to find people, before that bloggers were the instantly searchable source of potential experts, before that the web itself could be searched easily for groups that had web sites, before that topic-specific listserves were considered terrific resources.  And that's only going back to the late 1990's.  Each of these new tools was better in some way than the previous one, but none of them had gigantic implications. 

The reporter in the BeatBlogging story who found the alumni from the Scotland School for Veterans Children on Facebook, could just as easily done a web search, as I did, and in less than a minute found the regular web site for the alumni association, along with contact information.  


Facebook offers a wealth of information about "Friends" and family, but so far, it has done little to change news gathering and distribution.