ABC News and Facebook in Joint Effort to Bring Viewers Closer to Political Coverage
Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become a full-fledged platform for communicating, sharing and advertising. ABC News is betting that it will become a platform for political coverage, as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
ABC News is formalizing what the 2008 campaign has made obvious: voters, especially younger ones, are assembling on Facebook rather than in broadcast audiences. The partnership lands at an awkward moment for its host — Facebook's social ads push was announced just days earlier and met with indifference, while the Beacon feature has drawn public criticism from users and MoveOn over how member activity is shared.
For Facebook, a marquee news tie-in offers a counterweight to that backlash: a demonstration that the site is a civic platform, not merely an advertising one. The deal also fits a stretch where Facebook is scaling aggressively and competing with Google for engineering talent — distribution wins are part of that contest.
First-order effects
- ABC News gains direct access to Facebook's member base for political coverage during primary season, testing whether a network brand can drive engagement inside a social graph it does not control.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks and cable outlets face pressure to strike equivalent social-platform deals before the general election, turning exclusive platform partnerships into a competitive front alongside ratings.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news organizations become recurring tenants on platforms whose terms they do not set — a structural dependence in which reach is rented from social networks rather than owned, with each election cycle deepening the arrangement.
The trend: Broadcast news is migrating from owned channels onto social platforms, with the 2008 presidential race serving as the first full-scale test of whether networks can carry their authority across that boundary.