Facebook Ramping Up Journalist Outreach
In attempts to have the news feed contain more, well, news, Facebook staffed a new position with the goal of building relationships with reporters and news organizations.
In attempts to have the newsfeed contain more, well, news, Facebook is staffing up a new position with the goal of building relationships with reporters and news organizations.
Vadim Lavrusik, the social media company’s new journalist program manager will help do this, plus he’ll be tasked with organizing more journalism-focused events, and updating the new-ish Journalists on Facebook page. His position starts on April 25 in New York.
His last position was at Mashable, where he worked as the community manager. Facebook execs poached him largely because of blog posts he wrote about the “practical applications for using the giant social networking in reporting,” according to CNN. One such thing he wrote about was using Facebook as a sort of phone book type of resource to help reporters find sources.
Lavrusik told CNN:
A lot of journalists don’t have a professional presence on Facebook yet… They think it’s another thing they have to add to their workloads. … It can actually make your job easier
Reports are that the social media company may have a bit of Twitter envy – Twitter has long been heralded as a way for journalist to “overhear” snippets of conversation that could help inspire and source a news story.
Robin Sloan, who’s on the media partnership team with Twitter, told CNN that the microblogging service is “on every other monitor” in newsrooms she visits.
CNN thinks that Facebook had lagged Twitter and Tumblr in adoption by reporters as a tool for increasing productivity and news gathering, but that’s news to us here — and that’s CNN’s explanation for why Lavrusik got his new job.
Readers, what do you think Facebook could do to encourage more journalists to source stories on the leading social network?
