TheWayoftheWeb

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this one. Paid Content UK has revealed Johnston Press is banning employee access to Facebook, requiring journalists to ask permission from their department head, and contact the IT department.

Apparently it’s due to Facebook comprising more than half of the company’s outbound internet traffic. (They’re by no means alone in this…I can vouch for plenty of media and non-media business with the same traffic ratios).

PaidContent raises two important points – journalists are finding the site incredibly useful for their work, and Johnston titles run their own Facebook pages already!

In addition, I’d remind Johnston that it’s a media/content company, and everyone in the company should be able to not only use Facebook for work-related tasks, but also to be thinking about how Johnston will exist in the networked world.

And I’d see how many people in the Johnstone offices are now checking their mobiles more often…

It makes a smuch sense as banning people from reading printed news.

When technological advancements such as the printing press, telegraph or the car were invented, it took a while to get going. Even something as simple as sliced bread took a good few years before becoming widely adopted.

And yet the increasing pace of change means what seemed a novelty just a short time ago soon becomes expected.

The free wifi on National Express trains is one case in point.

When it was first introduced, it seemed like a minor miracle that I could now access the internet and get work done whilst travelling, for no extra charge, even in standard class.

But within a couple of years I’m amazed that other trains don’t have it, and I’m immensely frustrated and disappointed that the speed and reliability hasn’t improved. In fact it’s got much, much worse as more and more people are using laptops and netbooks on the train.

Mobile broadband is similar. It took a while for the mobile phone to become widely adopted, but now mobile internet access is becoming a standard and expected part of any new mobile device. And it’s data costs and anything less than 100% access that become the talking points, rather than the fact I can access the web from something in the palm of my hand.

And that frustration we feel is because we don’t just become accustomed to this access.

We come to rely on it.

For work, home, and everywhere in between.

Postscript:

Just remembered that apparently, 53% of British mobile phone users suffer ‘no mobile phobia’, or nomophobia, ‘with 48 per cent of women and 58 per cent of men questioned admitting to experiencing feelings of anxiety when they run out of battery or credit, lose their phone or have no network coverage.’ (HT Textually.org).

I’ve long been a fan of Mark Earls, and his writing on ‘herd theory’, which suggests that we tend to follow what other people do, rather than following the logical, rational decisions we often claim after the fact.

And I’m reminded of that theory every day on my commute to London. First comes the ‘Finsbury Park Standing Experiment’, whereby the first person to stand up in an attempt to gain a couple of vital minutes between leaving the train and joining the queue for the London Underground suddenly inspires everyone to fill the aisle of the carriage for the last 10-15 minutes of the journey. Despite the logical problem that after the first handful of ‘standers’, the rest of the queue fail to gain much time, if any. And people like me stay seated and working and then tend to be sat near the door anyway.

And if I don’t head underground, I then get to watch the ‘traffic light lemmings’. With any large group waiting to cross a road in the morning, it takes just one or two people to begin to cross, and the herd will follow, regardless of whether the lights are red, green, or there is a large lorry hurtling towards them with the lights on and horn blaring.

Meanwhile I undergo a strange transformation:

While I cycle to the station, I find myself becoming irritated by cars and pedestrians..

While I’m on the train, I miss not travelling by car/motorcycle – especially when the wifi fails.

When I’m walking to work, it’s cars and cyclists that cause problems.

Who I perceive to be causing problems and irritation is entirely dependant on which form of transport I’m using at the time, even in the space of the same journey. Am I herding myself into the mass view of that form of transit, or just setting myself apart from the stereotype of each mass transport group?

It could be a great time to run a newspaper soon, if Judge Richard Posner has his way.

He has suggested that linking to copyright material should be outlawed,

‘Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent . . .’

You can read his blog post, or the appropriate level of disbelief in Erik Schonfeld’s coverage, as he rightly points out this idea would outlaw public discourse, freedom of speech and fair use rights.

Jeff Jarvis mentions a column by Connie Schultz which proposes content would be available only on the originators website for the first 24 hours.

If either law ever came into existence, I have the perfect way to create a hugely successful news source.

Licence it all under Creative Commons.

While the rest of the newspaper sites are struggling to understand that they can’t coerce people into only linking to them in the correct, legal, or desired way, a Creative Commons site would clean up in inbound links and traffic until it was the only one standing!

What about when the subjects we cover start to control the news?

An interesting series of articles is just starting over on Nieman Journalism Lab, discussing what happens when Sports Leagues are able to become media moguls and control the news.

In the U.S., Major League Baseball has launched it’s own cable TV channel MLB Network, which is the focus of the first of the four part series.

But it isn’t just leagues that can afford TV which offer a threat.

It’s every organisation or business which is now able to reach consumers/fans directly via Facebook, Twitter, Email etc. All enabling them to reach an ever-increasing audience to distribute their beliefs, opinions and news.

Whether or not that content is well-received is another matter, but the simple fact is that it’s out there, and increasing daily. And will only increase for every bit of evidence that can indicate it’s more effective in driving transactional revenue than straight advertising.

Every media business needs to be planning for what happens if and when the subjects of your stories (and advertisers) start telling them for themselves.