Our sister site SocialTimes recently spoke to Vadim Lavrusik, manager of Facebook’s journalism program. Lavrusik talked about why Facebook is the Rolodex of today’s journalists and how they can use the social network to report. Some of the takeaways:

Finding Sources
For finding people, journalists can type in phrases like ”College students in New York, NY” and “People who work at Facebook and like the New York Times“ to target a group of people if they don’t have a specific person in mind. From there, examining a person’s profile information such as a friends list or relationship status can be a starting point for verifying his or her identity…

Discovering Content
Facebook is also a good source of eye-witness videos and photos that journalists can discover and request to use in their stories, said Lavrusik. For example, a search for “photos taken in Breezy Point” conjures more 1,000 images of the New York City neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012… Read more

Facebook just rolled out a new feature called Interest Lists that lets users organize what they care about into, well, lists.

Or, as the company said in its official announcement, Interest Lists “turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper, with special sections—or feeds—for topics that matter to you.”

One group of people using the service immediately is journalists. Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalist program manager, has even curated a list of “How Writers Are Using Interest Lists.” To search for other lists, visit the Add Interests page.

While it’s early days yet for Interest Lists, here are five possible ways journalists can use the new service. Read more

On average, journalists using Facebook’s subscribe feature have seen a 320 percent increase in subscribers since November, according to a Facebook analysis of 25 journalists. This sample included local,  national and international journalists who report on various platforms.

The growth is coming from social and interest-based discovery, wrote Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalist program manager and Betsy Cameron, a data analyst.

“People discover journalists to subscribe to on Facebook through their friends in News Feed; Facebook search; our “people to subscribe to” recommendations engine (which shows you who your friends are subscribing to and recommends journalists based on your interests); and other organic discovery mechanisms, such as simply seeing who your friends have subscribed to,” they wrote. Read more