The influence of Social Media

by Sharon Robins

 A cop in Washington DC pulled a gun during a snowball fight.  It became UK news on 22^nd December as reported in a free newspaper for rail users, The Metro

The Metro, 22 Dec 09

Shown circled in the photo above, editorial by Miles Erwin reads; “… organised a mass snowfight via Twitter on Saturday..”    with further down  “Washington DC police department initially denied a gun was drawn but backed down after various YouTube posts proved the opposite.

Washington City paper blogged about it with pictures and video sent in.  It is not clear whether the contributors, described as eye witnesses, were infact journalists out looking for material or geniunely citizens on the street.

Whatever the origin of the video footage, certainly many people saw it and it did influence the Police department’s final version and has made international news.

Showbiz

Radio Jackie target South West London with hourly 3 minute bulletins containing national and local news with half hourly summaries at peak times. 

They currently use Twitter to follow a couple of their local MP’s and report accordingly but at this stage they are not crowd sourcing. 

News & Sport Editor, Rod Bradbury believes that Twitter and Facebook are an invaluable tool for any journalist focusing on showbiz;

“..you know then you will be on Facebook and Twitter the whole time and you will be using those as sources.”

Click for the full Radio Jackie interview.

Skype

The immediacy offered by social media websites provided basis for the early coverage of Haiti following the earthquake that decimated their infrastructure.

Pressgazette.co.uk reported how various news teams scrambled for coverage with one of the first interviews being via Skype.  Although Twitter messages were coming through, broadcasters had difficulty verifying whether messages and images were genuine.

After making contact via Facebook and while mobiles and telephones were down, Skype enabled people to give their own live eye witness reports.

Public not private

Returning to Twitter and it’s influence on news, that is to say keeping people informed or indeed being the news, consider the updates from SkyNews which came an hour apart:

SkyNews Good morning all. Another busy day – Sky’s team in Haiti still coming up with great stuff. It’s all here: http://www.skynews.com/haiti about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck

 SkyNews Apologies to those offended by my newsspeak – maybe “powerful, compelling stories” is more appropriate. JG (@scook94, @corneiliuz, @hjames) about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck   

I don’t imagine the majority of the public would think pictures of amputees, reports of lack of food and water, not to mention dead bodies piled up, to really be ‘great stuff.’

It would be interesting to know whether that statement influenced any readers to no longer follow SkyNews.

Emily Bell, Director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, edit of interview by Sharon Robins

Emily Bell, Director of digital content for Guardian News & Media:

Journalism today uses technology but it also uses really rigorous editorial thought.

The fundamental is still how do I tell this story most accurately? … in an immediate way but which adds real depth and value to users and audience.  The real time web exposes people’s interest in a story’s life cycle. 

Twitter has made an incredible difference; (I could) see who knew about ‘it’ and what was being said about it, not just in the UK but around the world and who’d already published.  I could tweet and directly ask a question. 

The impact on the actual process of journalism of social media is that you have to start your engagement much earlier.  Publishing is not the definitive event.  It’s a continuing conversation and it’s a continuing process.  Curate your community.

 (Overall) I think social media has made a marginal difference to output but I think that that’s because the real impact of it hasn’t been fully absorbed.

Social media is less impactful where…you really have to have personal contact and get access to information which is not only not in the public domain but which is actively protected.

Face to Face still needed

In investigations (which thrive on secrecy), it’s very important to keep tabs on the story and actually visiting. The best example I can give from the Guardians perspective is the G20 where we had the video of Ian Tomlinson being pushed over by a policeman.

That came out of a collaboration where people had videoed it and very traditional reporting methods whereby Paul Lewis our reporter went backwards and forwards to the scene and talked to the family and talked to the police and talked to witnesses.

And that’s the sort of kind of investigation and even those now are helped by the network and the gathering of real time information by more people than just professional journalists.

Curating community

I’ve got followers; 6,000 people on my twitter feed.  At least half of them are going to be able to help me in some way if they catch my tweets.

You have to feed that audience; gathering your contacts.  And the process is to be interested in the conversations around the stories that you think are important or that you’re following.

In other words, commenting on tweeting they’re links as well as creating your own.  And then actually responding to and interactively engaging with feedback.

Fastest or best?

How do you balance deadline and immediacy with actually the fact that you don’t have a bounded format? In a digital world it is about what is the value of fastest and what’s the value of best? 

And a brilliantly argued, lengthy, properly linked thesis about a particular aspect of the story that arrives three weeks after the event has to really add something dramatically valuable.

So in a way the churnalism aspect of it is, are you being asked to churn out instant opinion and have an authoritative view on something in a compressed way?

Is there anything else that myself and my colleagues, trainee journalists, need to know about social media in the future?

Go and have a look at the way Andrew Sparrow live blogged the Chilcot enquiry when Alistair Campbell was appearing in front of it.

And some of his preparation on that, even though it was a live event, but just his retrieval of the documents and his ability to highlight particular phrases – he can now mark on his recorder; “Oh that’s interesting” and drop it into another folder.

We are getting better journalism out of all these processes and technologies. Journalists must embrace new media.

Click for the Emily Bell Interview page which has the transcript

Sourcing news from social networks

by Sharon Robins

 Early January, Pirate FM were investigating and reporting on a story that I understand came to them via Facebook. 

Just before Christmas 2009, a Cornish couple were told they had to remove the teddy bear from the grave of their son Harry who died in 2002 only 13 days old.  The teddy had been at the grave with Harry all these years.

The couple set up a facebook page with, at that time, nearly 40,000 people signed up to the page to highlight what happened. 

The Pirate FM news team verified the story, did interviews and broadcast the situation.

It all ended well, as reported online by BBC Cornwall.

Risk versus Verification

One of my concerns with news gathering from social media was verifying the truth; how do you know it’s true? When information is being fed in, rather than sourced by a journalist, surely there’s greater risk of being wrong.

Head of News for Pirate FM, Tristan Hunkin essentially said, it doesn’t matter as long as you tell the public the source.  So; “bla, bla, bla from face book” thus allowing the listener to decide for themselves if they believe or take it with a pinch of salt. 

If you don’t get that news out there immediately then the public will already have heard or read it from someone else anyway.

(AUDIO of Full Interview with Tristan Hunkin to follow, if not I’ll transcribe it and post it)

And another thing, writing from the News Re-Wired conference on One Man and His Blog, Adam Tinworth had the same conclusion as Tristan Hunkin but from the crowd source view;

“If we choose to ignore it, we lose attention and influence to other places where people can do their individual acts of journalism.”

The rise of Twitter in Journalism

I was weaving myself around the web this weekend and came across an interesting article on the evolving relationship between social media and newsgathering.

A conference session was held back in summer 2009 entitled ‘Twitter as a News Gathering Tool‘.  It was attended by various high-profile news journalists, including Ann Curry of NBC and Rick Sanchez of CNN.  All were Twittering and providing their followers with their take on the news.

Some members of the panel though were concerned how this increasing phenomenon might be undervaluing the quality of news.  According to Robert Scoble (a professional Twitterer), ‘actual news is now coming from citizens versus journalists’.  Here comes a crucial debate: will Twitter (and other social media) replace the standard newsgathering methods we have known for so long?

The traditional panel journalists relies on ‘no, but’.  Though social media may inform the audience faster and easier then accessing traditional broadcast news outlets, it is (as exemplified with citizen journalism) unverified, unconfirmed news reporting.

Here comes the bridge between a journalist and a member of the public.  It is argued that it is the professional journalist that members of the public trust more and rely on for accurate news output, rather than the citizen journalist.  It’s the issue of credibility….BBC, ITN, Sky, CNN, ABC, NBC, etc are all trustworthy and reliable sources. Citizen journalism is not.  Yet the power of social media IS increasing.

All the panellists are Twittering, and like many organisations, see this particular medium as easy-access and a free method of contacting the world at large.  I personally now subscribe to around 10 Twitter feeds, including CNN, AP, Nick Robinson (BBC Political Editor) and the Daily Telegraph, each providing a quick news story update throughout the day.  It used to be that the public had to buy newspaper to read the news, then it was check the internet to keep up with the latest stories, before moving onto mobile phone WAP.  Now, though social media, anybody (including professional journalists) can keep their audience of ‘followers’ right up to date with the news at the simple sending of a text.

As one panellist said, it is better to be ‘rather late and right, than early and wrong’…though this is in contrast to the traditional race of the news agencies – who can be first and accurate.

Read the full article here.

Jason