Wishing ABC News and Facebook Good Luck

Usually when I blog about Facebook I do it bitterly. It is pretty obvious that I’m not its biggest fan. This is not to say that I’m incapable of praising the social network.

Well Facebook, today is your lucky day. Oh and congrats to ABC News too.

According to a NYT’s article Facebook and ABC News are joining “to bring viewers closer to political coverage.”

I usually rant about how “scary” Facebook is and how it is overrated but there are many that would disagree. The true power of Facebook (and part of the reason I think it is a tad scary) is that it has been able to attract and keep 56 million users. Most of them young and in some years “responsible” for our world.

The new friendship is allowing reporters to have pages in order to interact with the users as well as will allow news from ABC News into Facebook’s political section.

I don’t blame advertisers and businesses who want to tap into this resource. It can be argued that ABC News is joining with Facebook to have access to their users (ie. the same thing businesses are trying to do). But because of its social role as an informer and the fact that I believe news sources are of importance to any society I applaud any movement to spread information.

ABC news is finding new ways to inform those who wouldn’t normally get their information from them (or worst, wouldn’t get information from anyone).

Will this work? Will this spread knowledge the way a naïve journalism student would want it to? Probably not. Or at least it doesn’t seem this way now when only about 200 people are linked to a reporter.

But I think it’s a good start and, in my opinion, beats having a second life reporter.