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Facebook Graph Search will help journalists find lawyers for stories

January 15, 2013

20130115-184818.jpg Reporters are always looking for sources and experts to quote, in many cases, lawyers.

Vadim Lavrusik (@Lavrusik), Journalism Program Manager at Facebook and Adjunct at Columbia Journalism School, writes that Facebook’s new Graph Search presents ‘A “Rolodex” of 1 Billion Potential Sources.’

The new search enables journalists to do richer searches when trying to find an expert for a story. For example, say you’re doing a story on a specific company and you’re looking to interview someone who works at the company in their New York office, you could do this by searching for “People who work at ACME Inc in New York” to find potential employees to reach out to. You could even make the search more specific to find people who work at the company with a specific title, for example. This could make it easier to find potential sources & experts to reach out to for stories you’re working on.

The search can be taken up a notch by looking at age, school, connections (friends) and a litany of personal and professional preferences. You can also expect social search to expand so that it will be impacted by what one shares and reads.

Of course the flip side is that we can find journalists to follow and connect with (something I do regularly). From Lavrusik:

As journalists are always on the hunt for new sources and pictures to accompany stories, the social network’s latest smart search features could reveal a wealth of opportunities for uncovering new information. Perhaps the biggest areas for members of the media include sifting through public photos on the site and looking for experts.

For lawyers this means sharing demographic and background information on yourself as well as sharing news and commenting on news on Facebook. Unwilling to give and share? Then you may receive less when it comes to engaging reporters and being engaged as a expert source.

Hat tip to the Mashable’s Samantha Murphy (@murphysamanthaj).

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