When Facebook released their Best Practices guide for media last week, I admit I thought it was cute. In my world, I consider Facebook sort of my ‘private life,’ a space I reserve to share thoughts and internet things with people I actually know, whereas I consider Twitter my more public persona, where I follow strangers’ opinions. Facebook’s advice seemed like they were pointing out the obvious (‘have your content creators use the ‘Follow’ button’) in a last ditch attempt to make the social network as relevant as Twitter, especially in the wake of the all the ‘social media as wire service’ talk since the Boston marathon bombings and manhunt.

But that’s sort of a fallacy. In fact, one billion people still use Facebook, all the time. When I’m honest with myself, my newsfeed is just as full of wedding photos and lunch break musings from my real-life acquaintances as it is new posts and headlines from my favorite media outlets, just like Twitter. And Facebook is starting to get savvy about helping those publishers garner traffic and reader engagement. It’s not a bad product. 

Slate is the best example of a using Facebook to successfully engage their readers; it’s even the case study in the handbook. They’ve doubled their Facebook referrals between the second quarter of 2012 and the first of 2013. Read more

Last week, Poynter shared findings from its recent eye-tracking study. Using “eyetracking gear, observation and exit interviews,” Poynter tracked 36 people as they engaged with news stories on an iPad, an article for the study noted.

In order to make sure differences between study participants were apparent, Poynter brought in candidates from two separate age groups: 18-28-year-olds and 45-55-year-olds.

According to Poynter, iPad users in the study fell into one of two categories when they were interacting with a news story:

“People were either intimately involved with the iPad screen while reading during our recent eyetracking study — keeping nearly constant contact while touching, tapping, pinching and swiping to adjust their view — or they carefully arranged a full screen of text before physically detaching as they sat back to read.”

Read more

This newspaper dress contest was too fun not to pass on.

When I was in high school (which wasn’t that long ago, eh hem, a decade), I remember some kids entering a contest for designing and wearing duct tape prom attire. This takes it to a whole other, way more awesome level.

The Detroit Free Press encouraged local students to design prom dresses made from newspapers for the chance to win $500. And what the local girls came up with is nothing short of awesome.

Users can select their favorite dress and rank them to help determine the $500 winner.

The Freep says it received more than 20 entries. You can check out the photo gallery of the top eight newspaper dressmaker finalists here. And you can vote on your favorite until midnight Thursday.

This is a great example of a way for a newspaper to engage its readership — especially its young readers — and promote the print product in a creative way. They tie it together nicely with the smooth voting/ranking mechanism and online contest. Innovative and fun for participants and other readers.

Thanks to Poynter for pointing this contest out. They also have some fun links to other newspaper fashions, including this gallery of newspaper dresses.

Research intern Kate Pape at NPR dug into some data from GfK MRI and was surprised to find that newspaper readership amongst young people is higher than expected—more than half of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper (in paper form) one to 14 times a month. She wrote, “Millennials keep pace with total US adults until it comes to comparing the number of heavy readers,” which is when adults outpace millennials by almost a half. However, young people have always read the newspaper less, even before people carried the Internet around in their pockets. As Christopher Sopher shows in his report on young people and the news, older Americans’ news readership declined by 29 percent since 1972, while that of young people declined by 16 percent. Read more

When looking for inspiration for your own reader-submissions projects, The New York Times’ collection of storytelling tools is a good place to start because they do it so well. The following examples are ways that The Times have creatively gathered and displayed information submitted by people on the Internet to tell a story. The common thread amongst all of the examples below are that they limit readers to a very specific and thought-provoking theme. Read more