But Carvin also emphasized the importance of audience expectations. “They still see our site as mainly dedicated to consuming news,” he said. Facebook, on the other hand, is a web venue in which people are used to chatting with their family and friends.

..NPR’s Facebook page is a complement to, not a substitute for, other kinds of NPR news consumption.

.. NPR posts about three or four queries a week — asking, for instance, for jobless 20-somethings who might be willing to talk to an NPR reporter about their experiences.

..The articles that Carvin and his team post to the Facebook site aren’t typically the day’s lead stories or items of big breaking news. Instead, Carvin said, the question he asks before posting is, “Will our friends want to talk about this?”

The result, Carvin said, is that conversations on NPR’s Facebook page can become surprisingly intimate

Notes

Three main points from this post that are important.
1) "For newsrooms that are behind on mobile—and the vast majority of them are,” said Bentley, “the mobile web site is most important thing they need to catch up on. When you’re using a mobile device, you should get taken to mobile site. Technically, it’s not that hard to do.”

And don’t forget about e-mail and text messaging in your mobile strategy, warns, Bentley.

2) While you’re planning for how your news organization will publish and engage audiences via mobile channels, Bentley says it’s equally important to start getting newsroom staff more comfortable with using their cell phone as device for more than just making voice calls.

3) “In the news business, we are too darn serious. We forget that no one buys a cell phone or computer to read news, or a TV to watch news. Across all media, news is a value-add. So make sure your first mobile offerings are fun…"

"Journalism has no theory of change — at least not at the level of practice.

I’ve taken to asking editors, “what do you want your work to change in society?” The answer is generally along the lines of, “we aren’t here to change things. We are only here to publish information.” I don’t think that’s an acceptable answer. Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim.

"Similar concerns over how messages are received arise in many fields, from crisis communications to public diplomacy. But not in journalism. If journalism does not change action it must change minds, but the tools and language of belief change seem to be entirely missing from the profession."

We need metrics, in particular, to determine “which online interactions represent real relationships, where an influence might possibly be exerted.”

..And that has big implications not only for news organizations, but also for the platforms that are hoping to translate their ubiquity into financial and social gain. If you want your work to have impact, then targeting a bundle of closely connected networks — with news, with links, with messages — may make more sense than going for numbers alone. Spreading a conversation is not the same as affecting it. “I’m not saying that Twitter is useless,” Christakis said, “but I think that the ability of Twitter to disseminate information is different than its ability to influence behavior.”

Part of the issues that Jess and I investigated as part of our Investing in Impact report.

“Quality counts. Meaning counts. Investment counts. Not everyone who’s invested is going to share content on social media or jump into the comments section…"

"This illustrates a problem that newsrooms everywhere are facing when it comes to social media. How do you measure a return on investment for an effort that may produce awareness, loyalty and future customers, but that doesn’t immediately drive page views?"