Thursday, February 16, 2012

MEDIA BUSINESS AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES: Newspapers for Facebook - Washington Post, Guardian and other media outlets launch social news applications




Since Facebook rolled out a new social news app on Thursday, media outlets like the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The Guardian, The Daily and The Independent all have announced they will be using the Facebook news app technology, reported Poynter.org. The Wall Street Journal already unveiled its own news app, WSJ Social.
The Washington Post Social Reader provides a "a personalized news site experience created just for you," the Washington Post said in an editors' note. Not only will any Washington Post stories be available through the newspaper's Facebook app, but so will stories from Slate, the Associated Press, Mashable, and Global Post, the editors' note explained.
The app, which is free, also allows Facebook users to see what news their friends are reading, Mashable said.
Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pointed out that one of "the obvious reasons for media companies to hitch their digital wagons to Facebook’s star are the sheer quantity of potential readers who are using the network."
While both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal apps keep users within the confines of the Facebook platform -- which, as Ingram noted, is "an awful lot of power and control to hand over to a service that holds on fairly tightly to the data produced by its users" -- the Yahoo News app will actually take users to Yahoo links outside of Facebook.
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