Facebook is Eating the World

"Facebook is Eating the World."

That was the title of a an article in Columbia Journalism Review that went viral in March.

In, author Emily Bell noted that "something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry . . . our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred."

And what is that change? "Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything," she writes.

"It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world."

And what are the implications? She notes two things.

First, news publishers have lost control over distribution. Second, "the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies."

And what is behind this change? The mobile revolution.

"Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded," she writes.

And since the majority of American adults are Facebook users, that is also where they now get their news.

Bell cites a report from the Pew Research Center which found that around 40 percent of American adults today  consider Facebook a source of news.

This is both good and bad for the media, she says. On the one hand, it provides new opportunities to distribute content.

On the other hand, it  narrows the choices the media has to share that content, and requires them to surrender control to businesses like Facebook--as are well all.

"With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online every day, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what," she says.

"And we have no option but to trust them to do this."

As Bell points out, we have little or no insight into how each company (Facebook or Google) is sorting its news.

"If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it."

And yet, Bell sees no way around it.

"It seems most likely that the next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast range of devices and platforms," she writes.

"As this shift happens, posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned in favor of hyperdistribution."

What does this mean for non-profits?

Although we have spent a lot of time and energy working on our websites, the conversation is moving to social media.

Like for the media, we need to figure out ways to use social media to share our messages.

Unlike the media, however, we lack the resources to make much of an impact on things like Facebook. 

Which makes me wonder: Is this an opportunity for like-minded groups to pool their resources to try to make a bigger splash in social media?

What if we agreed to share one Facebook aggregator page on a subject like poverty or water or hunger? A page that was as up-to-date and as technologically sophisticated as possible?

Maybe by pooling our resources and expertise we can create enough energy to stay up on the changes and provide content in a way that works well with Facebook, and with the people who want to learn more about the work we do.

It's a big challenge. But unless we figure out a way to play this game, like the media we will find ourselves sidelined and voiceless--just like the poor and hungry and vulnerable people we are trying to speak for.

What Can NGOs Learn from the Great Canadian Newspaper War?

In 1998, Canada’s major newspapers went to war.

That was the year the National Post was launched, sparking a circulation battle with the Globe and Mail and the Star in Toronto.

It was a fierce fight. But instead of going to war against each other, they should have been focusing on a common enemy: The Internet.

That's the view of John Stackhouse, author of the new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of the Media Revolution, 

In a chapter in the book titled, appropriately, “The Wrong War,” Stackhouse notes that the real fight was against Google and the other digital upstarts that aggregated and, later, created news and other content.

It’s not like newspapers weren’t warned about their real enemy. 

As early as 1992, Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post wrote about a visit to Apple and what he saw as the danger to newspapers of the coming digital world.

In a memo, Kaiser wrote that the Post needed to do two things immediately: Create electronic classifieds and publish an electronic edition.

“Both ideas,” Stackhouse writes, “were ignored.”

So why did newspapers fail to react and respond to this new enemy?

For one thing, life was pretty good for newspapers in the 1990s. They were one of the main ways people got news, and how advertisers reached the public. They were making lots of money.

For another, they had invested heavily in buildings, presses, shipping departments and work forces.

The result? When the online world took off, both for news and advertising, newspapers were left behind.

It didn't matter which newspaper won the printed circulation war; the battle was already lost as subscribers and advertisers drifted away to the new digital world.

What does this have to do with the international relief & development sector? 

Like newspapers in the 1990s, I think the sector is fighting the wrong war.

Instead of focusing on the big challenge of how to grab attention in this noisy world or expand the total number of Canadians who support relief and development, groups are fixated on how to address their own funding and communication challenges.

This is understandable; there are programs to be supported and staff to be paid.

The problem is we are fighting against each other, not against public indifference in general.

Of course, being non-profits, we don’t talk that way. We don’t speak about competing with other organizations.

But that is exactly what we are doing.

Worse, instead of expanding the overall donation pie, we are fighting for the attention and money of a small, and decreasing, number of givers.

According to a report in The Philanthropist, only about eight percent of total charitable giving in Canada goes for international purposes (very broadly defined).

And who is giving those funds? According to other research from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, the typical international donor is more likely to be older and to cite religious motivations for donating.

Since religious attendance in Canada is declining, especially among mainline churches, and since many donors are getting older, this should give all international NGOs pause. 

But instead of recognizing there is a problem, groups are busy using scarce resources to develop new and ambitious marketing and fundraising plans to either get traditional donors to give more, or to reach outside their donor base—to steal someone else's donor.

Instead of combining our efforts to make a larger splash in this noisy world of communications, most of our efforts hardly raise a peep outside our own little worlds.

In the end, like newspapers, we could find all these efforts are for nothing. We might hang on a little longer, but ultimately be defeated in the larger battle against public indifference. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that groups abandon their unique identities, missions or audiences.

I’m only suggesting that this might be a good time to come together to talk about creative ways to unite for a common cause and purpose—a United Way of international relief and development.

One group that is trying to do something like this is the Humanitarian Coalition, which is sponsoring the World Refugee Day campaign (June 20). 

Through it, the Coalition is trying to bring together NGOs to focus on the theme of refugees—with over 60 million displaced people in the world today, it is a huge crisis.

Maybe this experiment will work, maybe it won't. Or maybe it will spark new ideas for working together, instead of fighting the wrong war.

Thumb-Stopping Online Content and Other Thoughts About the Digital Revolution from the Head of CBC Digital News

One of the guest presenters at the April 27-29 Canadian Church Press convention was Brodie Fenlon, Senior Director for Digital News at the CBC. 

In a wide-ranging presentation, he covered a number of topics about the digital revolution overtaking legacy media—print and broadcast.

A summary of his remarks is below.

Is the content on your Facebook page “thumb-stopping”?

That’s the question Brodie Fenlon, Senior Director of CBC Digital News, asked at the April 27-29 Canadian Church Press convention in Toronto.

“You have to stop the thumb,” he said of the way most people get information today—on their phones.

“It has to be thumb-stopping.”

Good content, he went on to say, “is no good if doesn’t work on a phone.”

The New Legacy Media—Digital

Fenlon also noted that while we tend to view newspapers as a “legacy” media that the Internet disrupted, the Internet, or digital, itself has a legacy that has been disrupted.

In the case of the Internet, it has moved from the Web and desktop to mobile—that’s how most people access information today.

He noted that no communications technology has been adopted as quickly as the phone, with over 90% of people 18-34 now owning one.

“The war is on to win the audience on this thing,” he stated. “Over the next few years, the battle is to be one or lost on the smartphone.”

He said that already 63% of CBC’s audience comes to its website via a mobile device.

The CBC “still has a huge desktop audience, but future growth is phone,” he said, adding that websites and home pages are becoming legacy media themselves.

At the CBC, he said, “we treat our Facebook page like our website.”

And what’s on that CBC Facebook page?  Stories. “The thing the audience lands on is the story page,” he said.

Facebook: Eating the World

As for where users go on their phones, the answer, he said, is Facebook.

And it’s not only older people on Facebook, he said, dismissing a commonly-held notion.

90% of millennials use Facebook, he said, with YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram following in second, third and fourth place.

And, as he noted, that’s also where many people get their news—not from traditional news sources.

It’s the same for the next demographic, 35-54 year-olds—Facebook is first for them, too, followed by YouTube.

Snapchat is way back for that demographic, not surprisingly.

“Facebook is eating the world,” he said, quoting the title of the much-talked-about article by Emily Bell. 

“If you are going to win mobile, then you have to think social, and you have to start with Facebook,” he stated.

“If you would be stuck on an island can could only choose one social media platform, Facebook would be it,” he said—quickly adding that’s for right now.

“Who knows what I might say in a month,” he said.

Share and Share Alike

And when it comes to Facebook, the goal is to get people not just to like, but to share.

With that in mind, groups need to make it easy for people to share.

“Share buttons matter,” he said, and so do headlines and images.

The problem is that designers design Facebook posts on desktop computers, he said. They need to check the posts later to make sure they display the way they intended.

When it comes to headlines, they need to grab and hold attention.

On websites, it’s important to include key words like names of people, places, organizations or groups. But on Facebook, emotion is vital if you are going to get thumbs to stop.

“Headlines on websites are for robots,” he said. “You need different headlines for social media. You need to speak to the heart on social media, not to the robots.”

This means the sometimes there needs to be two different headlines and images—one for the website, and the other for Facebook.

Need for Speed

Speed is also important on mobile, he said.

According to Fenlon, studies show that 47% of people expect a site to load in two seconds or less. If it takes longer, 40% say they will leave.

What this means is that the websites—especially for mobile—need to be streamlined.

This is the reasoning behind Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

With Instant Articles, material loads faster, but organizations have to give it to Facebook—something very controversial for news organizations..

“This means we are building an audience for Facebook,” Fenlon said, “but the user experience is better.”

Facebook Leaning to Video

As for Facebook itself, he noted that it has once again changed it algorithms and now it is favouring video.

But, he noted, the kind of video that works on TV “won’t work on Facebook.”

On TV, video segments “are too long, they build-up to the moment.”

Facebook video, he said, has to be short and get right to the point.

Something new for them now is putting text over the video, so people can read what is being said.

“People usually use their mobile devices with the sound off,” so adding text helps to catch attention.

As for length, shorter is always better, he said.

The ideal length of a Facebook video is no longer than 90 seconds. YouTube hosts longer videos, “but the longer you go the better it has to be. If you are going to ask for two, three or four minutes of my time, it has better be worth it.”

What about Twitter?

Twitter is also important, he said, but it doesn’t reach the mass audience of Facebook.

Twitter users, he said, tend to be highly engaged audience, with a lot of journalists and a lot of influencers on that platform.

Facebook Worries and Paywalls

Fenlon admitted there are worrying things about the dominance of Facebook.

Its algorithm isn’t Canadian, he said, and it doesn’t prioritize Canadian news.

Instead, it “favours what your friends like, what you like.”

But that is also its genius, and why people spend so much time on it, he added.

“Facebook is a great experience—that’s why people spend time there,” he said. “You can rage against that, or try to build your own brand and presence in that space.”

As for the future, “we are In this weird grey zone, not sure where it is going,” he said of the Web and social media.

One place he is sure it is not going is towards paywalls and people paying for content online.

“I’m not an expert on monetizing content, but a paywall is a tough sell,” he said. “It only works for biggest players.”

As for the younger generation, they “will not pay,” he stated, referencing a study that showed that 70% said they will never pay for news.

Subscribing to things, he noted, is something people over 50 are used to doing—not the younger generation.

The Future of TV News

As for traditional CBC TV news, “we will see real withdrawl from local news,” he said.

The idea of the supper hour or evening news—what is called appointment viewing—is something only older people do. Younger people don’t consume news that way.

They have no interest in a traditional hour-long format, where they wait until something they are interested in comes up, he shared.

The supper and evening news is “a relic,” he stated. “We have to re-think the newscast. Instead of telling people what happened today, we need to tell them why it matters, and what will happen tomorrow as a result.”

This will involve a psychological change for broadcasters, he added.

Today it is video first—the needs of TV. In the near future, it will be digital first, and TV second.

“We are still trying to republish TV stuff to digital,” he said. “We need to do digital first, then go to TV.”