When I publish stories on FlamboroughToday, I want people to read them.
And I want people to read them at FlamboroughToday.com. We are a hyper-local news outlet, filling the news gap in the Flamborough community, and every visit to our website helps continue the work we do.
So it can feel very frustrating to go on Facebook, the Meta-owned social media platform many people in Flamborough use to stay in contact with each other, and see my articles have been copied from our website and pasted in their entirety over a wide range of community groups.
Instead of readers going to the website, which is free, many are reading and engaging with their local news on a third-party website that does not support the work we do. It also does not allow us to see, in hard numbers, the reach we are having in the community.
These things are incredibly important to a newsroom. We need to know how many people are reading, if our work is reaching our audience, if it is starting conversation in the community, if there is feedback for us to consider.
The Online News Act, intended to protect local media outlets, has instead resulted in many obstacles that prevent readers from getting to our site. For those who may not know, on June 22, 2023, Bill C-18 went into effect. This legislation requires social media websites to pay news outlets for traffic to their sites. The idea was to return ad revenue to news media outlets, which has largely shifted to social media websites over the past decade, thus funding and protecting wounded Canadian media.
This is not what happened, of course. Meta is a private company and, when pressured to pay up by the Canadian federal government, the company chose to block all news media, including from outlets outside of the country.
So I understand why people copy the articles and paste them into their Facebook community groups - I really do. There is no easy way to share links where people can read them.
Spaces is coming
Village Media, the company that owns FlamboroughToday, invests in the communities where it operates, employing professional journalists who write reliable community news, sponsoring local organizations and charities, and much more.
It has also launched its own social media platform, Spaces, to provide readers with access to news in a safe and engaging forum. Flamborough Spaces is coming soon; you can get on the waitlist for it now.
In the meantime, there are other ways to stay connected with FlamboroughToday. We have a free newsletter we can send to your email address. There are also benefits to going on the website, which features ads for local businesses that need more support than ever, local events you might not know about, and, of course, original local journalism.
I want residents in Waterdown, Carlisle, Rockton, Sheffield, Greensville, Mountsberg, Millgrove, Freelton and all the other towns, villages and hamlets in our coverage area to read and engage in the news. I love it when people discuss the stories I publish, share their own thoughts, and bring up aspects of a story that maybe I missed or wasn’t aware of. I keep tabs on what people are saying in quite a few Facebook community groups in Flamborough.
But please, don't copy and paste them from our website.
It might make it take a few more steps to type in FlamboroughToday.com and use the search bar to find an article, or fill in the blanks when someone on Facebook spaces out the URL for an article, but those extra keystrokes make a huge difference in what we do, and it is very much appreciated.
The F Files is a regular column featuring the opinions of FlamboroughToday writers on a variety of local topics.
