Fairfax sites tune into Twitter sharing
In what looks to me like a new development, Fairfax Digital Media’s Australian news sites smh.com.au and theage.com.au have started dabbling with story-sharing on Twitter.
So far, it only appears to be on certain stories – the National news section only, by the looks of it.
Readers are offered the option of a single click to share a story on Twitter.
However, one refinement that’s still probably needed is that the link generated takes about a third of Twitter’s 140 characters, which does seem a tad long. (I wonder if this is as a result of them wanting to keep smh.com.au intact for SEO reasons?)
You might be a loser, but if you’re first to the story, wouldn’t you be inclined to be the first to tweet it?
They’d save themselves some trouble by encouraging their journos to tweet with links. Trusting them to do so responsibly would illustrate the folly of News Ltd lacking trust in their journos on twitter.
The twitter and conversation module looks like it’s been rolled out across all their Masthead article pages.
Some of us already tweet with links: Annabel Crabb (Under the Flag) , Jessica Halloran (Sport), Asher Moses (Tech), me as Videonewseditor (Video, unsurprisingly). We tend to do it as individuals, which gives a bit of freedom to comment. It seems we are trusted.
“However, the grammar may yet want a bit of a tidy-up for when only one person is reading”
Seriously… that’s just lazy web development..