Facebook vs. WordPress (for HS news website)

[Mike Lowe]

Sorry for the "I teach HS journalism" spamming...this is the second and last one!

I want to take our school newspaper back to having a digital component, and would LOVE to have a highly interactive Facebook page if it's possible. What I mean is, I know I can create a FB page, but what I'd like to be able to do is post stories with pics with proper formatting, much like I'd be able to with WordPress.

I love WordPress, but it's amazing the way in which students gravitate towards Facebook (covering such movement in my masters program right now) and I know this would be a great opportunity to get their work out to show to not only their classmates, but family, etc.

Hope that makes sense...I'm not great with Facebook but do have a page for my music...I guess I'm just curious if it's capable of more than I'm aware of and would make for a good choice (aside from traffic) for a news website that'd compliment our hard copied paper.

[Ronnie Dobbs2]

I would consider using the FB page to link to the WP blog? That way people can comment, like etc. but the content and formatting are held elsewhere.

Which is to say I'm not sure how much flexibility FB provides.

[JediKooter]

I would not rely on facebook for anything other than a link or twitter style updates. Facebook changes a feature on you and you're school's paper could be dead in the water.

I think with wordpress, you have a bit more control over formatting and stuff like that.

[Mike Lowe]

Thanks for the thoughts guys...I might give extra credit to students who "like" our WordPress page (if we go that route) and/or make mention of it on their news feed.

[DanGarion]

If you end up running Wordpress look into Wordbooker, makes crossposting easier, IMO.

WordPress › Wordbooker « WordPress Plugins (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbooker/)

[JonInMiddleGA]

I'd be inclined toward what some of the others have said I think.

I'd use WordPress (or similar) for the actually content creation/storage & use FB (and Twitter) as a means of promoting traffic to the blog site.

That's pretty commonplace for newspapers I think, here's a couple of examples

Athens Banner-Herald
Incompatible Browser | Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/abh2gofan)

The Red & Black (UGA student newspaper)
Incompatible Browser | Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/theredandblack?ref=nf)

[Young Drachma]

You might want to consider Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com) in that case, as it may be the best of both worlds, in that it offers you the opportunity to post short, pithy things as necessary but can support a more robust website if you all get to the point that you can support that. You can import your tumblr feed to Facebook too, if people start to follow your FB page for news alerts and the such.

Just find a Tumblr theme (in their directory) that will support Disqus comments since Tumblr themes don't come with comments natively, the integration works fine though and Disqus come with a different set of advantages.

Another possibility is Posterous (http://www.posterous.com), which is similar but has less traction than Tumblr and comes with a different set of advantages and disadvantages depending on how you'd use it.