Q&A: How the Meta news block is impacting student newspapers in London, Ont.
CBC
The ongoing blocking of Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram is making it hard for media organizations across the country to ensure their content is reaching their audiences.
The social media news ban is the result of an ongoing battle between tech giant Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, and the federal government over who should pay for news that's repurposed on the platforms.
It's presenting a unique challenge for student-run newspapers at universities and colleges, whose main demographic is young adults who primarily rely on social media apps to find and share their news.
CBC London Morning host Allison Devereaux spoke with student journalists Estella Ren, editor-in-chief of The Gazette at Western University, and Hannah Theodore, editor at the Interrobang at Fanshawe College. They shared how the news block is affecting their organizations.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Allison Devereaux: How has the move by Meta to block Canadian news affected your publication?
Estella Ren: It has a huge impact on our publication because after we publish our news on the website, we publish them again on Instagram stories and if it's a big news or feature story, publish them in an Instagram post.
We have 6,900 followers on Instagram, each of them reposts our stories and [they'd] reach thousands of people before Meta blocked us. And we all know that Generation Z lives and breathes Facebook and Instagram, our Gazette readers are students who are in this age group, and Instagram is where we get most of our foot traffic from.
AD: Estella, how much would that traffic gap be? How many people are going to your website versus the amount accessing stories through your social media?
ER: From what I observe, most of our readers will know the stories we publish from Instagram and then they would click on the link to go on the website and read stories, so we get most of our traffic from Instagram
AD: Hannah, how did readers on your end start finding out that something had changed?
Hannah Theodore: It was kind of a slow trickle even for myself, going to our Instagram page and noticing that our content was no longer visible. Members of our videography team were coming into my office asking 'Are we still making vertical videos?' Because I've been working on expanding our multi-media growth because we also know that's how our audience is consuming news, especially on Instagram, they want that video content, so we're losing a huge piece of the way that we're trying to reach students right now.
LISTEN: How campus newspapers are navigating the Meta news ban
AD: Does it feel as though you put a lot of work into social media and it's just not there anymore?
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