News about the news

Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels

In case you haven't heard, Facebook and the Australian Government are being a bit nasty to each other and the Aussie people using Facebook have been dragged into their bickering.

Because of this I am again going to revert to my website as my main information hub and writing news source. I will be maintaining my Instagram account (yes, I know Facebook owns Instagram) as well.

My plan is to resurrect, in part, my monthly newsletter. Though, instead of a newsletter that will be emailed to you, I'll be posting a blog with any updates right here on my website.

There will be a couple of options for catching up with any writing news:
1. Subscribe to the blog and I'll send you a notification when I post the monthly updates blog.
2. Drop by each month to check out the blog. The monthly post will go up on the 1st day of each month.
3. Use the RSS feed to be notified of posts.
4. Follow me on Instagram. I'll post notifications there, and the link to my website is always in my profile.

I could of course keep using my Facebook page to share news, but I have issues with that.
Firstly, there are creators like me out there who's content has been used on social media over and over. I understand that they have most likely been paid for it from the original source, but Facebook encourages the sharing because it helps keep people on their platform. If the information was only available at the original source, then people would spend less time on social media which is not what the companies want. I believe there should be some recompense for the content owners. The government recompenses me each year for my books being borrowed from libraries, so why can't big money-making companies recompense too?
Secondly, and lets flip the argument, news corporations could put pay walls on their content. A lot do already. Does that mean the content owners are just being greedy, lazy, or both?

I can see both sides of the argument, but one thing settled my dilemma. Facebook, with it's usual lack of thought (or do I mean common decency?) have not only canned news sites, but COVID-19 resource pages and other emergency service pages. To me, this is an excessively broad definition of 'news', but there's more. Pages that spread disinformation and (brainless) conspiracy theories are allowed to remain.

That sealed the deal. Facebook can have it's tanty and throw its weight around, but it's going to do it without me.

So please hit the subscribe button, follow me on Instagram, or drop by each month to see what's happening. I won't be posting on Facebook for a while.

As always, take care of yourselves.