How Facebook is going local and what that means for the media

In a new simplified version of the social landscape, Twitter is for news, Instagram is for lifestyle and celebrity and Facebook is for everyday life and local communities.

If Facebook has a metaphor of what it now wants News Feed to be, that metaphor appears to be a local newspaper.

When announcing sweeping changes to the feed, Mark Zuckerberg put a lot of emphasis on “thigh-knit communities” and the interaction they foster. While Zuckerberg didn’t mention local, he mentioned sports teams as an example of the kind of community he has in mind.

The company has also been pushing its Marketplace feature forcefully in many countries, trying to highlight local deals and flea market dynamics. Though eBay might be the main target, Marketplace also looks partially like a local play.

So, it seems, the “tight-knit communities” Zuckerberg talks about are more about the local environment and everyday things, not the national, global or partisan (media) agenda.

To drive engagement, Facebook is turning to an idyllic vision of local media and community.

It’s leaving the business of real-time news to Twitter and focusing on the personal. In this simplified version of the social landscape, Twitter is for news, Instagram is for lifestyle and celebrity and Facebook is for everyday life. Where this leaves Facebook’s Watch TV platform is anybody’s guess.

If you believe Facebook (and you might struggle after the constant pivots-to-this-and-then-this-and-also-that), there is also an opportunity for local publishing here.

De-emphasizing Pages in News Feed might in the short term hurt local publishers more than big national ones. Big publishers generally have more direct traffic which generates more personal sharing. Smaller publishers have less direct traffic so they might be harder hit. Also, the new local focus might bring in new competition that drives people to spend more time on Facebook and less on local publishers’ digital offerings.

To cope, Jeff Jarvis is offering something of a facilitating role for journalists in Facebook’s vision of community, which basically means Facebook Groups with a local focus. Here’s Jarvis’s new definition of journalism, updated after the Zuckerberg announcement:

This is the stuff Facebook says it is now emphasizing.

Getting this stuff to pay for itself remains a problem, though. Connecting the solutions journalism approach and productive investigations to a paywall model seems possible. But to get people to pay, journalists first must earn their place in the community.

If you take Zuckerberg at face value, the chances for this are now better than before.

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