What about the future?

by Sharon Robins

The media guardian, 24th November 2009, reports After social networks, what next? 

The bits I found interesting:  LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman; “ I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. 

You might think, ‘who wants to consume all this useless information?’ but with some information it’s like with ice cream.  It is not nutritious but people still eat it.”

Surely the Flake is nutrious?

Dr Kate Blackmon, an Oxford lecturer says the future is not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering. 

I would go one further after the chats I’ve had with newsy people and say a news team especially needs to crowd source and then it needs to crowd filter.  Maybe Kate had said; “not so much about crowd sourcing but more crowd filtering.”  Context can easily be changed by a lost word or two.

Just consider Emily Bell, Director Digital Content at the Guardian with 6,000 Twitter followers.  Surely she doesn’t read all their tweets; not with three children and a husband too? 

But those followers are access to a massive contact list who also have contacts.  Thousands of sources.

Back to the article where CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone said;  “I believe in the trend of openness.  Using an open technology, creating an open platform and being more transparent.  That is where we are heading.”

He also said Twitter isn’t a social network it’s an information network. 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter , Professor at Harvard Business School, believes success hinges on connectors making and expanding that information network; On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors

She says; “Power goes to the connectors; those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups.  Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. 

In essence, she who has the best network wins.”

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.”