Facebook is a recent tool in teaching journalism at Wintec. Initially it was used to stay in touch with online correspondence students. Now it is used to by-pass institutional communication channels to meet students on familiar ground. It is our experience that (perhaps, hopefully) journalism students distrust institutional attempts to communicate with them through news forums on teaching platforms such as Moodle. Likewise, institutionally assigned student email addresses are almost universally ignored. This paper looks at the central role Facebook now plays in the way we run our classes.