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A news Web site goes Facebook-only

June 24, 2011

The publishers of all-volunteer local news blog Rockville Central made an unusual leap in March: They bagged their traditional Web site and instead moved their operation entirely to Facebook. The Post’s Ian Shapira chronicled their decision and what it could mean to the media industry. Though the blog has a relatively small reach, their gambit poses a question for the broader media industry. Are journalism outlets taking best advantage of Facebook? Will the role of social networking sites continue to grow when it comes to content aggregation and distribution?

Shapira’s account of the decision is here. And below, Rockville Central’s publishers explain how the maintenance and mechanics of their work has changed since they went all Facebook, all the time.

“Rockville Central: Day to day maintenance”

By Cindy Cotte Griffiths and Brad Rourke

Since we shifted from being a standalone Web site to being all-Facebook, we still have many of the same basic chores to perform to keep content running, but we go about them in a slightly different way.

One change with using Facebook is that things we used to schedule ahead of time now need to be done at publishing time. So, instead of Brad scheduling the week’s “POTD’s” (Picture Of The Day) and letting them publish on their own, on Sunday afternoon Brad will gather the week’s photos and write a Note for each one, saving it as a draft. Then, around 6 each morning, Brad will take that day’s POTD Note and publish it. (Our rules for POTD: The photos must be taken fairly recently, within the Rockville city limits.)

Since the move to Facebook, we link to stories from other sources to a much greater extent. Finding up-to-the-minute news involves constant Google Searches for Rockville, Md. Cindy also keeps TweetDeck open with Lists of local news sources and searches on the Rockville hashtag #rkv (which we established) and “Rockville.” We also follow other local news producers on Facebook to easily share links. In addition to linking to the stories, when an incident is occurring, we can report the situation in the status line and the community can provide many of the details. In this way, the community is helping to provide the news as it happens, which rarely occurred on the Web site.

Often, readers will submit stories that they would like us to publish. One case in point is Rockville resident Roald Schrack, who has been publishing a series of statistical explorations of Rockville’s voting population. We love his pieces because they almost never need any editing. When we have one of those to post, we try to do that midday so more people see it.

Every Thursday, Cindy does an event Pick of the Week occurring in Rockville. Often readers send requests for their events to be highlighted but she also checks local calendars and her friends’ postings on Facebook to make the Pick. Here is an example of Facebook making it easier on us. Although Cindy sometimes writes up the Pick in a separate article, now she can post a link to the event itself with a brief bit of commentary in the status line. The event goes to the same number of people, yet the time it takes to logistically get that done is more than halved.

One thing that has changed with our move to Facebook is the way we look at statistics. With a standalone Web site and a real-time statistics package (We used Statcounter), you can really get engrossed in watching traffic numbers from moment to moment. With Facebook, our statistics (which Facebook calls “Insights”) are delayed by 24 hours, so no amount of checking and re-checking will change them. This has actually created less churn, as we are not tempted to watch traffic so closely.

That said, we do pay attention to the impressions each post get, and the feedback percentage (the percentage of people who saw the post who either Liked it or commented on it) because we are most interested in these interactions and how people participate.