Newsnight Builds A Facebook Group: Lessons Learned

Facebook has, without a doubt, become the network of networks. Whenever BeatBlogging is described, journalists all eventually come to the same catch-phrase: Oh, you are building Facebook groups for reporters.” Our last post was an interview with a reporter from VentureBeat who has had success with Facebook as an individual – but what about reporter who want to build groups on Facebook?

Each of the 13 Beat Bloggers are deciding for themselves how they will build their networks and only a few have decided to use Facebook (and nothing is set in stone). But before they do, we should critically examine Facebook. In my opinion, if you really want a living and breathing social network, Facebook isn’t necessarily the best tool. The groups function doesn’t allow you to use the API’s, which makes the individual networking so functional. Without these – Facebook groups consists of a wall to blast shouts, a forum, and a section for links. Great for planning a birthday party, but that won’t help you too much if you want to cover Proctor&Gamble.

Below is an interview with Paul Mason, a correspondent for the BBC’s Newsnight show. Mason has recently
created two Facebook groups: Get Yourself On Newsnight and Feral Beasts Of The Media. Combined
Mason has attracted over 1,500 people to the groups.

How did this start? I understand it was very natural – nothing was forced.

Tony
Blair made a speech describing the media as “feral beasts.” One of my
mates who works for Sky News immediately changed her status on Facebook
to “is a Feral Beast.” After thinking about this for ten minutes I set
up FBOM as a group on Facebook. Lots of other parts of the UK
journalism subculture responded to this: about three days later I was
on my mobile in the middle of the street in London and a man came up to
me and pinned a badge on me saying “Feral Beast” without exchanging a
word or interrupting my conversation. Later I found out he was a tech
journalist who I vaguely knew who had the badges made. Others
commissioned t-shirts. Anyway 1,331 people have joined FBOM including a
lot of journalists whose work I admire. After this me and my editor
said, why don’t we do a FB group directly related to the programme so
we just set up Get Yourself On Newsnight.

Why Facebook? Were other options looked at?

Me
and my editor, Peter Barron, have the view that you’ve got to be on
everything and try everything. I have gradually won him over to the
view that you don’t use social media to “broadcast” a corporate message
- (although hold that thought over blogging for a moment and we’ll come
back to it). You should just go out there, be yourself (within the
limits of a PSB role where you are not supposed to have opinions) and
interact. Before FB I made a couple of successful interventions into
Second Life, doing a studio 2-way with UK legendary anchor Jeremy
Paxman. I have an ambition to do something with mobile next; MySpace we
kind of missed; Bebo – we’ve actually done something there by getting
them to run a poll about whether young people appreciate Britain’s
growing ethnic diversity. It got a massive response but some of the
replies were so racist that Bebo took the entire thing down even before
we broadcast it! Bebo’s boss came on the programme to talk about why
the kids had responded like that. Yeah the next thing has to be mobile
and also global. I think the next big global political event will be
massive on mobile and social networks: one thing people missed for
example was that when Iran held 15 UK service-people over the Gulf
incident, there was a massive response in favor of the youngest guy -
an 18 year old sailor – on Bebo. Everybody in the mainstream media
missed this.

3. It sounds like the second group wasn’t an all out success — what do you think was missing for you to be satisfied. What
were you happy about?

Get yourself on Newsnight was not that big
a success: it just didn’t generate momentum because it was not event
based. It has reinforced my view that you have to do fast, event based stuff on
social networks and then move on. For example right now I am working on
the Labour political donations scandal. I was trying to move a story on
and basically put in my status update – ie the most mercurial thing you
can have on FB – “does anybody know who the two unnamed officials are”?
I got some decent responses.

4. You got a decent amount of people to join. Kudos. What methods did you use to spread the word and get people to join?

310
people at present, and if I look at them again they are the following:
a) people from my own Friends list; b) former interns on Newsnight c)
people who work on the programme d) viewers who regularly interact with
the programme and e) – this is the interesting one – quite a number of
other jounralists, bloggers and experts who, if I were doing
beatblogging, I would consider trying to rope into a beat! So they have
kind of gravitated towards doing beatblogging spontaneously. However,
it is very me centered – despite the fact there are 12 other reporters
on the programme I sense not many of them have dragged their network of
contacts into the group. Another phenomenon is that on Newsnight we
have a quite young offscreen team and they are Facebook-crazy. A lot of
them have pulled people from their social network into this group, It
has potential but not all of it realized. We got people to join by
asking the staff to invite their FB friends.

5. If you could do this project again: What would you do differently.

I
would not try this again. We will make our mark on FB again soon, but
its got to be guerilla-ist and full of zeitgeist and very witty
otherwise nobody is interested.

6. What methods did you use to try and engage people and get them active? What worked? What didn’t?

There
is a reluctance among some onscreen people to get involved with social
networking. For obvious reasons – I am talking about presenters and big
name reporters who value their privacy and are already bombarded with
trivia and social networking opportunities in the real world.

7. Any advice to the beatbloggers at NewAssignment.Net or other reporters in general who are trying this?

No
advice – I am here to learn. The thing is, as I have thought about who
I would invite to a beatblog network, I have started to think it has to
be a private, i.e. closed, network and nurtured like a reporter’s contact
book over many years. The big difference is with your contacts -
especially in business and politics – as a point of principle you never
tell the others who you are talking to. You piece together info like a
jigsaw. It would be weird if they could all see who the others are!
Also, I have a very idealistic view of who I would want in a beatblog
network – unachievable really – but you have to aim high. The kind of
access I would want would have some of my contacts getting their
corporate lawyers involved, or their PR teams, so it might never work.

8. You were one of the BBC’s first bloggers but you say you’ve moved on from that? Why?

I
was the first onscreen person in the BBC to be allowed to blog. It
happened like this: we were covering the runup to Gleneagles G7 in 2005
and I said we have to use a blog to do this. I also had a SonyEricsson
P910 and showed the editor how you can moblog on it. So I had been
messing around with Typepad and we asked our big bosses could I do it
and they didn’t see why not. I think it was a busy afternoon. Within a
day I had a blog on Typepad called Newsnig8t and it generated a lot of
stories and interest. HOWEVER, then things took a turn towards the
corporate issues. It turns out we were not supposed to be running the
blog. Another major uprising against us came out of the tech department
which was aghast that we were running something outside the BBC’s
firewall. Six months later the BBC got around to rebuilding a
blog-engine inside its own walled garden, using Moveable Type, and I
was one of the first people to be pulled onto that platform. Two or
three other people with much higher profiles than me have since
overtaken me in the blogging stakes – Nick Robinson, the BBC’s
political editor, is frankly kicking everybody else’s ass in mainstream
journalism with his blog, closely followed by the Business Editor
Robert Peston and Matt Frei form BBC World America. But once the blogs
went corporate all the fun went out of it. Meanwhile Newsnight
discovered a use for the inhouse blog engine that was far more prosaic
- a feedback site is what it became – and that works well for us.
Within a space of 24 months we have totally gone through a bell curve
on blogging. I have personally given up blogging per-se – I think the
high point was my imaginary speech to the England Team in the 2006
World Cup which got a massive circulation and take up, sent around fan
sites and email lists, so much so that real football people in the
social circle of the England team – and I swear this is the truth -
actually got in touch with me to say “who the hell are you and why are
you doing this”.

Here;s the link

I
think blogging is a little bit “over” now – not completely but its
getting there. Its evolving back towards mainstream comment and
analysis. The true social media is Facebook, Youtube and whatever comes
after that. The network is bigger than the node. Blogging was still
about nodes. Actually I think there is a lot left in something like
Livejournal. I will add one other thing about the blog experience: at
the BBC you are expected to do it for free, with no extra remuneration.
One day this will go the same way as schoolteachers running the
football team at night for simply the love of the game – ie it will not
last!

9. What should journalists do next? The same as before
only realise technology has given other people the means to research,
produce content and publish it so you are competing with them. You have
to move towards the quality end of journalism that adds something to
that. My mate is a world-famous photographer: two years ago he was
bemoaning the fact that everyone had a digital SLR. Today he is telling
me he can live off his back catalogue alone because so much of what is
produced by amateurs and semi-professionals is crap. My suspicion is
that the dross has actually pulled the quality of the middle ground
downwards, leaving the true creator of great content head and shoulders
above the rest, The same is going to be true for print and broadcast
journalists, also book authors because that’s another world where there
is an ever increasing spiral of dross being produced: there will be
fewer of us, but our audited, peer-reviewed work environment – aka what
the people in activist groups call the “corporate media” and what I
keep reiterating is the “newsroom”- is why what we do will have lasting
value.