New York Times begins publishing directly on Facebook
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Signaling just how important Facebook is for publishers, including law firms, The New York Times will begin a partnership with Facebook this week where the Times will publish articles and content directly to the social network’s News Feed. The content will be consumed free of charge by users.
Buzzfeed, NBC News and National Geographic will join Facebook, Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) reports for the New York Magazine.
Rather than people, including Times‘ reporters, sharing a link to a story which is then read on NYTimes.com like today, stories will be published and read in the Facebook atmosphere itself.
The deal raises all sorts of concerns for the Times, per Sherman.
How many articles will Facebook get to publish per day? What is the revenue sharing breakdown? How does the Times protect the independence of its journalism, say, if the paper runs a hard-hitting investigation on Facebook? And what happens when the Times allows Facebook to insert itself between its journalism and its readers?
The partnership is also causing some high anxiety in the newsroom, according to Sherman, with some journalists seeing it as the end of the Times as we know it.
When rumors of a deal surfaced last October, the Times‘ late media columnist David Carr articulated this view, writing “the wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike.”
Why do the deal? It’s kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Much like Toys R Us over a decade ago surrendering to the use of Amazon’s digital sales solution rather than continuing to use their own, the Times had no other choice.
In just 11 years Mark Zuckerberg had created a better digital publishing platform for the distribution of journalism than publishers themselves.
The Times publishes great journalism, but with social media beating its digital subscription business model, the Times had little choice than to harness the leader in social media platforms.
Whst’s the message to lawyers and law firms?
You’re not going to get the keys to the Facebook publishing platform anytime soon, if ever. But Facebook is becoming increasingly important for the proper and effective sharing of your blog posts and articles.
As with the Times, resistance is futile.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Scott Beale