I am currently interning at The Philadelphia Inquirer, doing a multitude of duties. On June 28, 2007, the Online Department had a staff meeting, during which one topic included the role of the social networking website http://www.facebook.com as a tool for increasing online newspaper readership and exposure. After the meeting I wrote this memo:
We talked about this in the meeting earlier, so I did a little bit of research on Facebook applications in general, and how The Washington Post has capitalized on the frenzy. The author of this blog made some great points:
From: Rob Curley’s Blog
“For us, one of the most important things was to build something that we thought would work on Facebook and do it in a way that showed respect for what The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com stand for — and at the same time, try to get those Facebook members who had an interest in politics to remember that washingtonpost.com is the definitive site on the web for national politics…And we hope they are reminded of our newspaper’s commitment to political coverage every time they see The Compass with the washingtonpost.com logo on it.”
The blog makes important points about how people probably don’t just want an app with the latest headlines—even sports headlines. It has to be something innovative, interesting, and useful. The Inquirer has a wealth of resources in its journalists and columnists—Specialists and experts in their fields. A great Facebook application would leverage their expertise, presenting information, possibly allowing users to comment on or add, customize, or create additional information, fashioning something that they would want to share among themselves—All with Inquirer branding and a link to our Philly.com site.
This would not even have to be limited to the mostly college (now a bit broader) audience of Facebook. A MySpace application could be developed that would “drop” into a user’s page, much like google and youtube videos can be added to pages.
More: Press release from the Washington post on their Facebook application
