Facebook stops the news

I love my Facebook page and I probably get more chance to play with it because my work in digital PR involves a whole host of social networks. Having said that, it seems that a certain newsreader for 3AW loves their Facebook page a bit too much. According to the stories doing the rounds, during a broadcast a few weekends ago the newsreader was busy reading her Facebook updates and forgot to read the news.

When the newsreader was asked what went wrong, they claimed they were having “computer issues”…ahhh, those pesky “computer issues”…… After investigating the claims, the IT team found out that the newsreader was more interested in reading their facebook updates than the news. Oppps….but that’s not the end. How did station management deal with the incident? They sent an email to all staff telling them that Facebook was off-limits unless it was being used for research. Right…. So the next time it happens, it isn’t “computer issues”, it’s "research". 

MyTake – The reason I picked this story is to demonstrate the increasing relevance that news about your friends, i.e. your Facebook page, has. In this story, the actual news took second billing to news about the newsreaders friends. Alright, it’s a bit of an outrageous example, but we're spending more time online and in social networks than we are engaging with other mediums. I wonder what the newsreader’s status update was, I’d like to take a guess: “3AW Newsreader is…so busted”