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?)
And in a further initiative, the sites now offer an update on how many people are reading certain stories.
However, the grammar may yet want a bit of a tidy-up for when only one person is reading.
And I might need to be persuaded why, if I’m a loser who’s the only one reading a story I’d want to admit that to my friends.
But a good effort nonetheless.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large. He returned to Mumbrella as Publisher in January 2025
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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.
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The twitter and conversation module looks like it’s been rolled out across all their Masthead article pages.
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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.
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“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..
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