Facebook Notes as an alternate online publishing tool
What’s your alternate online publishing plan if your site goes down? On Friday, Oct. 21, The New York Times and The Verge faced this issue, as hackers attacked a major Internet infrastructure company. With the audience in mind, NPR’s digital editors turned to Facebook Notes to reach folks who otherwise might have been unable to see the story. With election night right around the corner, this might be something you’d want to consider if you run into technical issues with your own website(s).
A number of Nippers (what we call NPR employees) were confused when they saw this in their Facebook feeds, so we thought we’d explain.
— Lori Todd, social media editor
From Joe Ruiz, weekend digital editor:
That evening, prompted by one of my favorite news organizations (Vox Media), I suggested to our tech reporter, Alina Selyukh, and my fellow engagement team editor, Dana Farrington, that we use Facebook Notes to publish Alina’s ongoing story about the day’s internet disruption.
The thinking behind The Verge’s post of their story on Facebook, it appears, was to reach users where they are, especially if they were affected by the outage and had limited access to news.
On my desk, I keep a printed slide from a presentation created by a close friend and academic studying news. It’s of Isaac Lee, chief news officer at Univision, from a speech he gave at the International Symposium of Online Journalism a few years back. It reads: "If we are not prepared to go and search for the audience wherever they live, we will lose.“
To me, at the very least, that means we can’t expect our audience to seek us where we THINK they want to find us. We need to go to them.
By posting Alina’s story on Facebook Notes, we weren’t going to drive any traffic to NPR.org, NPR One (our audio listening app that’s tailored for you) , or our news app, but we tell an important story to an audience who likely wanted to know more from our reporter in a place they already were. The engagement we normally measure on Facebook wasn’t outstanding, but the audience who did read it were likely served by work we’d done. We simply needed to present it in a place where they already were, and for that, I hand it over to Dana.

From Dana Farrington, NPR engagement editor:
First, I had to be reminded that Facebook Notes even existed. Looking at our page’s archive, we have quite a few Notes from 2008, and exactly zero since then. But last year, Facebook upgraded this feature to make Notes “more beautiful and customizable.” Overall, the presentation was cleaner than a status update and allows for much more flexibility.
For Alina’s story, I copied and pasted directly from our content management system, and only had to make a few style tweaks. The tool allowed for hyperlinks and special formatting for setting off longer quotes. The hard part is manually updating any changes made to the story on NPR.org.
If we were to use this again, we’d want to consider the following things: How do we indicate that a post has been updated? What issues are there with image rights? (You can put an image across the top of the Note, but unlike a Link post, the image is stored on Facebook’s servers.)
Another question: Why not just use Instant Articles? (IAs are also a native presentation, but one that would pull directly from our site without the manual labor.) NPR does not currently use Instant Articles for most of our content, so Facebook Notes seems like a good alternative in a pinch — say if NPR.org went down. Plus, going back to Joe’s point about meeting your audience, there are surely Notes that could be written specifically for Facebook fans that would never appear on NPR.org at all.
Notes
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Weekend food for thought.
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