Facebook gets it. Bummer newspapers didn't

Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its final edition after nearly 150 years. Elsewhere, newspaper publishers everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia face equally grim prospects.

The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: "Openness and transparency isn't an end state. It's a process to get there."

It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.

Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.

What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)

There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.

It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.

Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:

Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.

[rimesparse]

"There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper..."

That's an understatement. I think there's a tendency for web-media writers to compare and contrast companies/sites simply because they're both on the web. In most cases, that seems misguided to me. I could be wrong, too, obviously. But I think discussing the situation with Rocky Mountain News (and newspapers in general) in the context of Facebook is just convenience. I.e., looking for a connection between things and seeing it even if it's not there because you have a blog post you've gotta fill.

[charlie cooper]

with all due respect, i think if you look a bit more closely, there are lessons which apply. fact is that unfortunately, the history of newspapers is chockablock with hidebound thinking - especially as they were forced to migrate to the web. let me offer a concrete example: the boston globe. this is a first rate metropolitan daily. yet their web site is beyond pathetic. unlike the washington post or the ny times, they are waaaaaay slow to update or redesign the home page to reflect news changes. the irony is that the globe's parent is the new york times company - and the times has a splendid web site.

[MartinRafferty]

I am so sick of snotty people who constantly complain about the quality or lack there of when it comes to Blogging. This happens on Engadget too. BACK OFF- If you don't like a blog why stay on the page any longer to make some negative comment? It's not that you just don't have a life..it's that you don't even have a INTERNMENT LIFE!! <rant complete>

Honestly,
Print vs Screen is just like telegrams vs phone calls.
Just evolution.
Although I still enjoy reading the paper myself (at times(

[strongpimphand]

Blogs typically take away from real reporting. They're typically filled with opinion and not facts. Rarely do people write blogs that are on a journalistic level.

A blog is a slap in the face in most cases. Only cases where up-to-date news is important can make a blog relevant - like if someone were to be shipped to the middle east or a breaking news situation was occurring.

The real reason why newspapers are failing is not because of users not being able to spam up their sites once they implement web 2.0 features (which unless i'm missing something, most newspapers I've read in the past few years have...)

It's because by the time the reader gets the news at 6am....it's old! They've already watched a blurb of it on the 10 o'clock, they've already watched CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/ESPN/ETC, they've already stumbled upon an article of it on msn or yahoo's front page..


The simplest solution for newspapers is to just focus on the weekend editions, and pack it full of local news.

[AlanHub]

pimphand, i whole heartedly agree. Just view any youtube "documentary". They feed off of the ignorance of the masses with an abject lack of understanding history and half-a$$ reporting.

[professionaladventurer]

Look, I am all for crowdsourcing, but look at the Anchorage Daily News (ADN.com) as an example of what happens when you let readers post comment on "news". It is a who's-who in mental illness, ignorance and soft hate speech - which you can also see on Facebook on FOX News. Same goes for Politico, Cnet, Wired, CNN and other outlets of all sizes. When you start treating all ideas equally you get a lot of crazy talk and basement boyz who think they know all the answers.

In this world there MUST be experts (and there are) who are well educated on a subject, not just someone who has an opinion. I do agree that the Newspaper model needs some tweaking to be kept alive, but we must not let the fear that some people know what they are talking about and deserve to be paid for their contribution due to their experience and education get in the way of operating a successful news outlet. We need both reporters AND commentators who are are trained and educated. There will always be room for eye witnesses to share, but they can't be in charge. We are not all equal even when we see the same thing.

[charlie cooper]

professionaladventurer (love that handle), i don't think we disagree. there should be room. unfortunately, the recession/depression has accelerated the decline of newspapers as advertising dries up. is there room for them to halt the decline? i don't know the answer to that question. my assumption is that before it's over, the shakeout will claim quite a few papers.

[M C]

I have to wholeheartedly agree to the initial statement - the Seattle P-I "Sound Off" comments have become legendary among local bloggers - as a place to direct people you don't want to move to Seattle. If you believed the swing of the average story's comments, we'd be the nation's capital for nutty right-wingers.

However, even given my longtime concerns about CNet, its discussion areas are often actually the most intelligent part of the site. You're welcome.

But agreed that there must be room for professionals, who treat journalism as more than talking-head opinion and more like science. Sometimes these erupt on their own (fivethirtyeight.com is an excellent recent example), but you shouldn't have to also be an entrepreneur to figure out how to have a career.

[gefitz]

Agreed about "there must be experts". But please let me decide who they are. The newspaper industry was (and I say "was" with purpose) so full of itself that it believed that people took them for a source of "the truth". That it's subscribers would hang onto them because they were the only source of "reliable" information. That people would continue to pay money for opinionated articles about this and that, because these articles were in print and therefore must be higher quality information.

I think what the internet did for people was introduce them to the idea that any information they see (blogs, print media, television, whatever) should be taken with a grain of salt. People just aren't getting anything of value from a newspaper anymore...or from television news, or from many different sources. And since newspapers/television couldn't create anything new or valuable for its subscribers/viewers, they'll disappear like any other business that couldn't change with it's customers needs.

[Inconnux]

Newspapers have been "interpreting" the news for decades. Is it any wonder why fewer people are reading their papers when they get further and further from the average persons world view? Advertising revenue drying up? couldn't be because of their anti-business socialist rants could it? why wouldn't a business support that?

As for Facebook, they have proven how arrogant they are when they decided to mutilate the interface last September... MILLIONS of people joined the protest groups but did they care? nope... wouldn't make it an option for people who were perfectly happy with the old interface. I remember Yahoo did this with their site a couple of years ago (when they were THE portal). People complained but did they care? nope of course not.. they know best... Facebook will be the next Yahoo in a couple of years, wondering what went wrong.

[elroy3054]

This is the beginning of the death of consensus. What most of you techies don't get, which your unshakable belief in technology will not let you computer, the internet will make society LESS democratic and MORE autocratic. You all think and believe that blogging will become the new model of journalism but so far nothing has replaced the newspapers that have vanished. They have just vanished like the twin towers, you can't appreciate the absence of something because you will never know what to look for. This is the "true" cost of the death of the "old model". The fact is newspapers provide a very valuable service in serving a community, such as a city or a region, which is defined by geography. The flattening effect of the internet destroys these communities further alienating us from each other. The 'net' effect is that we are all poorer if the 'old model' is destroyed at the expense of the 'new model' because nothing will grow that will effectively replace newspapers. Craigslist is good at the classifieds but it is not a source for news. What will fill the void when we can no longer agree upon basic facts? I fear for our democracy. I fear for our humanity.

[baconstang]

Right. I always go to Facebook for insight on major domestic and international policy.

[M C]

CNet shouldn't be preaching about journalism - at least until they clean up their own house. The bad taste of your trolling for clicks with incendiary headlines and stories built off little but press releases hasn't yet been purged by your VERY recent wholehearted embrace of blogging.

What blows about the decline of the newspapers is that the right-wing media will be the last to go, with their deeper pocketed ownership and rabidly cultish audience. The center is where we'll miss the broader press.

[bmn_1213]

There's so much that's wrong with this article I dont' know where to begin. Newspaper's are dying because they're losing ad revenue from classifieds because sites like craigslist give them away for free or more efficent e-commerce sites like ebay as well as more people reading online which I assume is less lucrative than paper advertising. That's it, period. There's this tendency for every person who has some hostility towards newspapers to project what they personally disliked about newspapers as they reason that newspaper's are failing. Of course, the newspaper had a "liberal bias" translation: they posted something that didn't agree 100% with my world view and used big words and concepts that I couldn't understand. Or maybe the newspapers are failing because the paperboy always throws the paper in the bushes or because they charge me so much for the Sunday edition. Cooper's theories are even more dumb, reader comments? Really? So that's all it took? Also what the hell difference would blogging make? Unless you're going to charge the reader 10 cents for every blog post. The problem with you tech snobs is all you do is yell out "big media bad big media bad!" and extoll the virtues of blogs and the internet, and you don't even understand what's going on. I'd rather have some respectable (as well as accountable) big newspaper to handle big stories and keep and eye on the government and big companies than the blogosphere built on rumormongering and senationalism.

[cromeyeller]

Thank you for bringing some common sense to this discussion. Blogging and Facebook fall far short of journalism. I don't look to them for anything resembling investigative reporting, news, or balanced treatment of stories.

What makes journalists different? They are college-educated professionals with a background in ETHICS and who are paid to present an unbiased view of events. They pound the pavement, calliing and interviewing experts and knowledgable witnesses, and the newsmakers themselves. They are not anonymous. They sometimes spend weeks interviewing subjects, analyzing data, making open records requests, and calling on insider sources in order to put together an investigative piece. This costs money, but the people who want all information to be "free" won't pay for it.

These folks are an integral and essential part of our democracy. The author's "suggestions" will do little to nothing to help profitability and are frankly, a little absurd. "Neighborhood blogs"? Wow, that's gonna be a money-maker.

[Wak_Em]

...getting a journalism degree does NOT make an expert in the news "reporting" industry. The death of and information source is CONTENT, if you do not have content that draws readers/listeners/viewers, then ad revenue declines. Opinion is NOT news. Half opinion combined with news is not news. Just the facts mam, just the facts. I will conduct "non-expert" research myself. Posting and AP story or a CNET story is not news, it is forwarding information. If I want opinion I will read the editorial page...ooops. The "experts" in news gathering and reporting are in their 80's if not dead. What killed the newspaper industry? Like any retail outlet that fails, diminishing customers wanting to buy your product. CNET does well for the very fact that it permits readers/listeners/viewers a place to do their "non-expert' research.

[someguynamedbob]

funnys. that's all the papers for

[Motyoj]

A truly idiotic article. Comparing Facebook to a newspaper is ludicrous.

[Tajmari--2008]

RT: @agfhome you need to read this and share. new media folks need to read this and understand why journalism matters. http://is.gd/ln3d

Greedy chains gobbled up newspapers and let their news production become nothing more than the gray matter that flowed around ads. Then the Internet and blogging exploded. Bloggers, as great as they may sometines be, cannot do the job that real, trained, on-the-job journalists should be doing. It's very sad about the Rocky Mountain News.