Earlier this month, East Cobb News turned six months old, as this community-focused news resource strives to cover more events and provide readers with local information they can’t get anywhere else.
Most of you find us through search engines like Google, but many of you also have East Cobb News stories delivered to you through social media channels, especially Facebook.
If you get East Cobb News stories mainly through Facebook, what you’ll see from us in your newsfeed will be changing very soon.
In fact, you’ll be getting less and less of what East Cobb News and other publishers share with you, even though you may like and follow our Facebook page and want to get your news this way.
That’s because Facebook this week announced major changes in what users will get in their news feed and will begin limiting the content you see from news organizations like ours.
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook account.
Facebook hopes this change will increase the quality of the news in your feed and give users more time to connect with the people most important to them.
Many of you rely on Facebook to see the content we post every day on East Cobb News. As I have learned as publisher and in a previous job covering East Cobb for AOL, many of our most engaged users, active East Cobb citizens, congregate on Facebook to share the latest news with their friends and neighbors.
It’s a shame that Facebook is making this move while upstart, independent local news outlets, like East Cobb News, are fighting to fill the gap left by newspapers and other media organizations. We’re just getting going with East Cobb News, and building an engaged readership, online as well as in the community.
One thing you can do if you follow the East Cobb News Page is to change your News Feed settings to “See First” (as shown at left) instead of “Default.” This prioritizes the pages you want to see, and was introduced a couple years ago by Facebook. Here’s more about See First, and for now, it appears it’s remaining as a user option.
As things change, however, we’re also finding that more and more East Cobb citizens are are signing up every day for our free weekly newsletter, the East Cobb News Digest, which is delivered every Sunday afternoon.
The Digest includes highlighted stories from the previous week and a glimpse of what’s on tap in the coming week, as well as useful community information.
Due to the changes being made by Facebook, I will be including a few more links from stories of the past week in the newsletter. Eventually I may increase the frequency of the newsletter to a couple times a week and send out alerts for major breaking news. East Cobb News does not sell or rent its newsletter subscriber list to anyone.
The simplest way to deal with these changes, if you are a Facebook user and get your news from East Cobb News, is to subscribe to our newsletter. If you haven’t done so, it’s free, and signing up is easy. After clicking the button below, you’ll never miss an important story about what’s going on in East Cobb.
Thanks for your readership of East Cobb News, and please let us know what you think. Feel free to contact me anytime at: wendy@eastcobbnews.com or call 404-219-4278.
