Facebook Has All The News That's Fit to Share

[Commentary] Facebook staffer Malorie Lucich wrote a post on the site's blog recently in which she talked about using the social network to keep up with the news in two different ways — both by picking up news from the friends you follow through their news feeds and status updates, but also by becoming a fan of pages from news outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and so on.

As I read her description of how she found out about Michael Jackson's death, the earthquake in Haiti and other major news events through Facebook, I remember thinking to myself: "I do that, too. But is it really that big a deal?" As it turns out, it just might be a big deal, in the sense that whatever a social network of 300 million people does tends to be a big deal.

According to research from Hitwise, the number of visits from Facebook to news and media web sites has been climbing rapidly — particularly when compared with Google News, which has barely budged from where it was a year ago. Hitwise staffer Heather Hopkins writes that "Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%."

Increasingly, regular folk seem to be getting their news from social networks such as Facebook as well as from the usual news sites such as MSN, Yahoo and Google News. And as more and more traditional media entities build out their Facebook presence, that trend seems likely to continue.