LANG likes Facebook, mobile apps

The nine newspapers in the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) plan to use Facebook's commenting system. Readers will have to sign into their Facebook accounts to leave a message at the bottom of a story. The system should make it easy to offer a comment, as long as the reader has a Facebook account; editors also hope to the system discourages people from leaving nasty comments since Facebook provides a link on the person's Facebook page.

Here's part of the memo from San Bernardino Sun/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin editor Frank Pine:

Just a heads up that we’re planning to make a fairly significant change to all of our websites in the very near future: We’ll be switching our commenting functions from Topix to Facebook. BANG is already doing this on insidebayarea.com, and it’s a substantial improvement over what we have here in that it makes commenting much easier, and by linking the comments to users’ Facebook accounts, it cuts down the more objectionable anonymous comments. While the traditional thinking is that requiring registration or real names with comments reduces traffic, insidebayarea.com has actually seen an increase in traffic and referral traffic from Facebook.

The memo goes on to say LANG is working on mobile phone apps for each of the newspapers and will soon get started on apps for computer tablets.