Facebook, the enemy of newspapers?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by feldman

The president of CNN, Jon Klein, issued a curious statement about the competitors that threaten the broadcaster: “I worry more about the 400 million users of Facebook and only two million of Fox News. But while Fox News is an all-news TV (owned by Murdoch) and is therefore a direct competitor, Facebook is a social network. Why is Klein concerned because of Facebook? Because his unstoppable success shows that people (especially young people, but not only) are more interested in communication as information. with other words, bring the communication to the center of their lives, and use the information they find on the Internet as a bargaining chip with social friends. Indeed, young people increasingly inform you on Facebook thanks to reports from acquaintances and from there click on the web page of a newspaper. Facebook is the fourth largest in the world (after Google, Yahoo and MSN) as a source of visitors to newspaper sites. The 3.52 percent of readers that happen on a news site Facebook is much more than Google News. And the phenomenon is growing: in recent days it became known that Facebook has become the most popular site in the U.S. (web traffic to Facebook is the 7.07 percent of the total) than Google. Some analysts say could soon become the most popular website for dissemination of news. (In fact, many newspapers, the Republic Espresso on the New York Times, have long since opened a location on Facebook). The success of social networks has an important impact on the crisis in publishing. Readers, especially younger ones, have become accustomed to a diet consisting of fragments of information from different sources. The cultural unity of a newspaper is no longer perceived by those who used to read bits of news have thousands of backgrounds. There is obviously nothing wrong in these new reading habits. Indeed. But this is rapidly wearing out the business model of newspapers.