BBC Radio 5Live – Breakfast: Social Media at its height?

BBC Radio 5 Live is a station that embraces social media. 5 Live Breakfast uses 4 types of social media to connect with its audience.

Besides the regular Breakfast show, the daily Breakfast phone is dedicated to listener conversation and comment.  According to Steve Bowbrick, editor of the 5 live blog, the success the programme is largely down to the interaction with the listeners.  Social media allows the programme to stay in contact with its audience, whilst also monitoring popular themes and topics which can become programme content.  Listeners become part of the show, and when the programme goes off air, listeners can continue to debate.  No longer is a show’s content limited to the its broadcast time slot.

Social media is actually crucial to 5 Live a lot. Being a talk radio station, presenters are constantly repeating ‘call 0500 909 693. Text 85050. Email via the website: bbc.co.uk/5live’. The station depends through out its schedule on conversation and comment with its listeners. Regular debates and discussion programmes are a key feature of the station’s programming and therefore demonstrates the importance though the phone-lines, emails, blogs and Facebook groups (Listening to Livesey as an example) can play.

Jason

Social media challenge

Social media challenge: Lydia’s results

Well, with local news in mind, I found the best thing to do was location searches across Twitter, blog search engines, and of course, Google. So I would type in “Truro” or “Penzance” into Twitter for example, and see what newsworthy treasures were in store for me.

What did I find? Sadly, my secret hopes to swoop down on a dynamite scoop, suck it up and sell it to the BBC never really materialized.

As with most situations, it seemed that the job of a journalist in this context was to infer and interpret. No one had posted “there’s been a murder!” so instead I found myself sifting through seeds of potential stories.

These were my most interesting findings:

Croydonbusiness@jameson: Yep, Sunday going to Helston in Cornwall, to visit our delivery partners who will be transporting the much needed aid to Haiti.

Considering the time sensitivity of the Haiti disaster, and how the Cornwall Shelterbox activity has received a lot of coverage, I thought this was a potential follow-on and development of that story.

Blog: In a similar vein, one Cornish blog posted the details of a Haiti disaster fundraising event. It could tie in with another Haiti story, or it could be used as background information.

A blog post similar to a press release

Jodierich2009 – Any idea when buses will start running again through St Agnes to Truro?

Not exactly a white-knuckle ride tid-bit of information, but perhaps serves as a good alert to travel news and updates. The snow had caused transport to grind to a halt, and this Twitter user was flagging this up before the FirstBus Twitter account had managed to convey that information.

BitsNBolt – Anyone know anything about tools, products, etc. to help government with FOI and public record issues on Twitter? Cambourne council need a hand

Local councils bamboozled by the media revolution

This particular Twitter post flummoxed me. The council was appealing to the public via Twitter for help with the FOI in relation to Twitter. Following last week’s controversy with the Cornwall councillors’ Twitter indiscretions, I thought this could make quite a meaty story about how Twitter is causing problems for local government.

Analysis

As Jason says, Sunday is generally a slow news day, and as our geographical area was so limited, we may have got distinctly different results if we’d attempted to gather international news. Part of the utility of the internet is its global reach.

In terms of finding leads, my results show that there are seeds out there, but you have to have news-story-eyes. Twitter isn’t necessarily going to hand you stories on a plate. But it can give you leads to leads. It can hint at potential story leads.

From the blogs that I looked at, I found it quite a time consuming way of finding potential leads. The blogosphere is a vastly expansive universe, and there’s a lot of information you have to trawl through in order to find something even remotely interesting. Textually, this makes sense. By design, blog posts are at least several paragraphs. So scanning through is rather time-consuming.

I got the strong sense from my interview with Jon Gripton that Twitter is primarily used for finding someone out there close to the news story, or a specialist of some kind, or simply someone who has a some information that could supplement a story that is already in existence. In terms of blogs, I think that they may be more useful when looking to gather specific information. For example, the blog of a geomorphology expert could potentially be packed out with breaking news stories on climate change.  However, if your news gathering is location-specific, the blogs become a little dreary. Perhaps my search would have been more fruitful if I’d refined my search to Cornwall blogs that were dedicated to Cornwall specific issues, such as fishing. Either way, I conclude that when scanning blogs for news, the search should be thematic, rather than based on location.

So, what’s the impact of social media upon established news gathering techniques?

They provide another source, and perhaps in most cases a supplementary one. However, they provide no guarantee of actual leads, and in order to use them effectively I predict that it would be necessary to make the search very thematic and very specific.