If you’re writing news for your student paper – cough, website – you are probably “in” enough with those that run the students’ union to have them as friends on Facebook. You’ll also have countless other students on the social network, who will be invariably spread amongst other countless cohorts (postgrads, international students, those living in different halls, studying on different campuses…) –the theory being, you’re a journalist, and you’ve probably got “connections”. If you’re writing news and you don’t have these campus connections, you’re missing a trick.

Now everyone is on Facebook. Twitter is still a relative niche in the wider world, if we’re honest, but Facebook? Everyone’s on it. And if I were to make up a statistic, I’d say about 90% of people have used the status update function to vent about some horrible unjust they have had afflicted upon them.

Given that pretty much no-one uses Facebook’s lists or privacy settings properly (myself included), these rants have a reach of probably around 100 or so fellow students.

Now what that annoying ticker does is show you, in real-time, exactly what your friends are doing. What it also does is show when they comment on the walls of people, groups or pages that are actually outside your own network. Friends of friends (of friends). And this has the effect of echoing those gripes, extending the reach of individual dissatisfaction two or three steps more than previously possible. If you’re lucky, you might spot something good.

For example: one of my connections on Facebook – who is an Academic (read: school/faculty) President, commented on one of her friend’s statuses. All I caught was the tail-start of a comment she left on the status of someone I didn’t know. Intrigued, I clicked – and it led to this story. On another occasion – again, a connection of mine commented on a post by someone I didn’t know in a group I wasn’t a part of – and I got this story about a security compromise on campus.

There may be concerns about this type of sourcing but I’ve found it extremely effective so far. Where I have needed to speak to more people about a story, I have simply privately messaged them (very few people have their profiles set up to block that feature). Another useful aspect is that, at the Scene, our news team is organised with a Facebook group – I can pass on the story to the team in two clicks.

It’s all a lot more relevant to student news than the desperate hunt up, down, and across Tweetdeck’s columns. Twitter is by far the better tool for hyperlocal news, and will continue to be so. But the ticker has recently proved its own when it comes to student issues.

Now I’m not saying you should spend all day staring at that ticker – though if you do that with Twitter you might as well do – but I am making the point that, for campus news , the Ticker provides a very real alternative.

Facebook provides the sort of gossip that is never picked up by trending #tags on Twitter – campus news – can spread like wildfire. Just keep your eyes open, and begin to ‘like’ the Ticker.