Facebook Gets Political With ABC News
By Andrew Wallenstein
In the never-ending quest to get younger demographics to pay attention to politics, Facebook and ABC News are linking up for the social networking's first partnership with a news division, reports The New York Times.
A first glimpse of how these two organizations are putting their resources on the page is not especially revealing. First, it's not entirely clear how one would even find the pages of the nowhere-near-household-name ABC reporters who are turning their own Facebook pages into windows for tracking the race. That strategy actually makes a lot of sense given the non-stop news cycle of a presidential campaign meshes well with Facebook, where people are accustomed to logging on many times a day just to check on the latest in their friends' lives. Facebook is also an elegant platform for mixing the often confusing interplay of media churned out during a campaign, including text and video.
But it is video that is in suspiciously short supply on the pages of the "off-air reporters" (oof, imagine having that title at a TV network). Eloise Harper (image at left) didn't seem to have any last I checked, and Sunlen Miller had a link not to her own dispatch, but an edition of "World News WebCast" that I didn't have the patience to sit through to find her.
There were plenty of blog postings though, which are drawn from ABC's "Political Radar" blog, which offer no shortage of minutiae from the campaign trails. For political junkies, Facebook is a cool way to interface with a a major news organization; for the 99.1% of us who are allergic to presidential stumping, I don't think Facebook will change anything. As one Curtis Bartley posted as a comment on a "Political Radar" dispatch devoted to a uneventful Hillary Clinton church visit (punctuation added): "My God, what is next? Will the press tell us when this woman goes to the bathroom?"
CNet News also makes an interesting point in its own coverage: "ABC News doesn't seem to have caught onto the fact that Facebook's user base sees the site as a platform for social recreation, not information consumption."
