Thursday, April 26, 2012

A Recent Development in "Facebook Journalism"

It's late at night...1:30 a.m. to be exact. I have work to do, yet of course, I have no problem clicking into Facebook to see what my friends are up to.

Like many others, I now have the new "timeline" feature. That took enough getting used to. Now, I see a strange "Trending Articles" on my newsfeed. It looks a little something like this.


This relatively new feature includes a short synopsis of the trending article - in this case "Larry Brown blasts Michael Jordan's Charlotte Bobcat..." - and I can see that my friend and two others have read this article. Interesting.

Facebook seems to be on its path to social media Internet domination, with its new and evolving way for its users to click on and read news articles that their friends have previously read and found interesting enough to link.

For more information, check out this article from Mashable Social Media.

2 comments:

  1. You draw and interesting connection between a specific feature on the user interface of a specific social network site, Facebook, and the ways that news is perceived as both notable if "trending" and if read by others in the same social graph. What new directions for digital journalism does this feature suggest? Will it transform what gets written and how?

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  2. Truthfully, "trending" articles draw my attention to what is being read by my friends. It's similar to the idea of friends linking news articles on their Facebooks, but if all my friends are reading something, then I want to read it too.

    In terms of digital journalism, I think that it has the potential to popularize certain articles over others and widen the gap between the types of articles read by consumers. News writers could tend to be more inclined to write what might be deemed popular, in order to cater to the biggest audience. We can only hope that it doesn't further bias journalistic reporting.

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