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Beehiiv is the latest platform to try to lure independent journalists with perks
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May 18, 2009, 7 a.m.

Facebook and Kindle: Two new ways to get to the Nieman Journalism Lab

You now have two new ways to get your Nieman Journalism Lab fix.

First, you can become our fan on Facebook. While we like having “fans” as much as anybody, the real reason you’d want to do so is that our Twitter feed will be integrated into your Facebook news feed, alongside your friends’ kvetching about their most recent meal. You’ll get 15 or so links about the future of journalism every weekday, gathered from around the web and curated by us here at the Lab. It’s a great way to stay informed, and if you’re the kind of person who spends all day reloading Facebook instead of Twitter, now you can get our stuff where you want it.

(If you’re not already reading our Twitter feed, note that Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, says that our feed is the sort of thing he’d have paid £100,000 for not long ago. [See around 6:55 into the video.] Alan, we’ll still take your money! But for you, dear reader, it’s free.)

At the moment, our Twitter feed is the only thing happening on our Facebook fan page. But if you have any suggestions or ideas on how we could use it better, we’re all ears. And of course if you just wanted to become a fan just to show that you like our content, we’d appreciate that, too.

Second, you can now subscribe to this blog on an Amazon Kindle. I remain a skeptic about the Kindle, and I am even more of one about reading blogs on one. First off, any link in a blog post takes you to the awful, maddening “experimental” web browser. And subscribing to a blog costs $0.99 or $1.99 a month, despite those same blogs’ availability for free on the real Internet. (We’re a $1.99 blog, although that was entirely Amazon’s decision. We’d give it away for free if they’d let us. And Amazon takes a 70 percent cut of all subscription revenue, just as with newspapers, so we won’t be getting rich off it.)

Still, some people love their Kindles, so we’re on it if that’s where you want to read us.

We’re also working on a few other ways to get our stuff in front of you; more to come on that. And of course there are also the traditional routes: subscribing to our RSS feed in your favorite reader; following us on Twitter; or just coming to the site whenever you get a hankering.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).
POSTED     May 18, 2009, 7 a.m.
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