What Facebook Instant Articles mean for Nigerian media organizations -By Funmilayo Ajala

Funmilayo Ajala

The digital space of media organisations in Nigeria has been a great challenge. Media houses still depend on adverts to run their papers, which makes them very sceptical about moving online as the strategy and formula to survive fully online has not yet been devised.

The people of the fourth realm do not know how to make good use of their power, thus their buy-over by politicians and money bags in the country. Meanwhile, the fast pace at which online usage by Nigerians has grown over the past five years is enough to push media organisations into the digital arena.

People now read news on their mobile phones and tablets; everything is done on the go.

Two weeks ago, Facebook launched a new feature specifically for media organizations called InstantArticles. Nine media organisations across the globe – The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel Online, BuzzFeed, NBC News, Bild, and The Atlantic – signed up for this testing phase with Facebook.

What this means for these newspaper houses is that they use most of the traffic that comes onto Facebook to generate traffic, boost revenue and they can run their own specific ads. Articles from these media organizations are posted on Facebook and when users click on the links, it opens the news article right there instead of redirecting you to the newspaper’s website where the article was originally posted.

Facebook InstantArticles have the following features:

Fast and responsive: It uses the same technology of loading photos and videos quickly as the Facebook App. It is 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.

Interactive and immersive: You can watch auto-play videos, zoom in on high-resolution photos, view interactive maps and listen to author’s voice with embedded captions.

Simple and scalable: It allows you to publish any type of article, from daily news coverage to longform features. It uses Standard HTML and RSS feeds to scale entire content libraries in the Instant Articles format thus providing a fast and interactive experience for all of your readers.

Control and customisation: Media organisations maintain control over their content and business model. It allows you to sell ads in your articles and keep the revenue. Earn traffic credit and bring your own analytics tools.

“One of the issues we see was how long it will take for those articles and news to load which we know on phones is a really big deal,” explained Chris Cox, chief product officer, Facebook.

“The video auto plays, allows you tell the story in a more visual and a more animated way. We spend a lot of time making sure that the business model is pretty solid, making sure that their brand is represented in the way that they want.”

The future of media is here, it is digital. People do not want to read long-form text without seeing pictures that explain the story or watching a short video that illustrates and give live and more credibility to the story.

The introduction of InstantArticles means that Nigerian media houses need to step up their game and invest money on their digital platform. It is time to include more pictures, more videos, infographics in storytelling.

Just having a news website does not mean you are digital; it is about exploring the whole 360 degrees of the digital world to tell a story.

Do you have reporters that can take great pictures, shoot and edit good videos, are not scared of working with data to create an infograph?

With the power of the internet used to the fullest advantage by the fourth realm we can contribute a whole lot of good in the policy making of Nigeria and build us a better future.

Dive head first into the digital space and then start correcting what works and what does not work, by this we will create the strategy and devise the method that works for us.

People want good stories, good stories are shareable.