Social media sure has changed the way we consume news. That should suffice to explain the trend for one-minute news of top stories and trending topics?
The American broadcaster ABC News has launched a micro-news programme, ‘The One Thing’, a daily newsletter of a minute’s duration displayed only on Facebook. Presented by the anchor of World News Tonight, David Muir, the programme will address the day’s top stories and trending topics from social networks. With a visual identity that follows the Facebook style — the blue colour, similar typeface for the logo and captions — Muir can deliver around five news topics in around 1:21 seconds.
This is the first daily news programme created specially for Facebook. About 1.3 billion people get on to Facebook at least once a month. The social network controls 20 per cent of traffic to news sites, and on mobile devices, the percentage is even higher. According to a study by Pew Research Center, about 30 per cent of American adults seek their news on Facebook.
With numbers like these, it is important for the media to perform well on social networks to attract readers to their sites. Getting your content to be tagged and shared on Facebook is something of extreme importance for media.
Newspapers such as Washington Post and Guardian have taken to social media. In 2012, both launched ‘Social Readers’ app for Facebook. While in the beginning, the app helped reach a large audience for both publications, it is less so now as social readers appear less prominently in a user’s Facebook timeline. Also, add the fact that users have complained about social reader applications, mostly those that require users to authorise the app and share their activity in order to read any article.