Johnston Press manage a Facebook facepalm moment…

July 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

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.

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  • http://angusfarquhar.tv Angus Farquhar

    Totally agree with you on this one Dan. I know our previous employer came very close to making the same decision, reasoning that it would save them a fortune in bandwidth and make people work more.
    I can understand the impetus to save money but, as you said, cutting off this kind of thing is ultimately going to cut of the company from forward thinking in a digital age and as a result make them less money, surely.
    On the issue of people wasting time of Facebook, I firmly believe that this should be an issue between managers and staff. Not a corporate decision at all. If staff members can get all their work done and properly and still have time to go on Facebook then good on them, it's up to their managers to monitor their work output as they should be doing all the time. If employees are able to waste so much time online then maybe they either don't have enough work to do or they're bad at their job. Either way it's their line managers problem to sort out.
    Letting people use the internet will make it become part of their everyday conciousness and seems the most likely way to start to get heel-draggers to start thinking digital when planning for the future.

  • http://angusfarquhar.tv Angus Farquhar

    Totally agree with you on this one Dan. I know our previous employer came very close to making the same decision, reasoning that it would save them a fortune in bandwidth and make people work more.
    I can understand the impetus to save money but, as you said, cutting off this kind of thing is ultimately going to cut of the company from forward thinking in a digital age and as a result make them less money, surely.
    On the issue of people wasting time of Facebook, I firmly believe that this should be an issue between managers and staff. Not a corporate decision at all. If staff members can get all their work done and properly and still have time to go on Facebook then good on them, it's up to their managers to monitor their work output as they should be doing all the time. If employees are able to waste so much time online then maybe they either don't have enough work to do or they're bad at their job. Either way it's their line managers problem to sort out.
    Letting people use the internet will make it become part of their everyday conciousness and seems the most likely way to start to get heel-draggers to start thinking digital when planning for the future.