WK 8: Social Media & Journalism

Social media has brought and everlasting change to journalism. Image
Around 62% of adults have been found to use social media as a new service in the U.S - Tutorial presentation, Hudson Fallon (Pew Research Center, 2016).  

One of the pitfalls of journalists ‘live-tweeting’ their stories is the fact it’s stopping people clicking on their websites or buying their publications. Twitter, essentially becomes users' portal for news. No longer are people required to go out and buy a publication or even visit a website. 

How this is managed into the future will be an ongoing concern for media organisations. For example, if I photograph a section of a newspaper and tweet the image – thereby allowing all my followers and others to read it without purchasing the publication – am I breaching copyright laws?

How does the media organisation stay on top of this? They don’t. It’s like photocopying the newspaper and handing it out to 100 people for free. Isn't this exactly the same as movie piracy which is so frond upon and highly illegal. 

It appears as those publications use their organisational social media as a means to drive traffic to their website, while their journalists actually engage and interact with the audience, thereby increasing their own personal brand and identity. 

This process is shared by Posetti’s (2013) assessment of the effects of twitter on journalism as she proposes the ‘effects have re-cast journalists as individual reporter brands with a focus on follower engagement, collaborative investigation and the ‘crowdsourcing’ of research (Posetti, 2013, p. 89). 

This system can be viewed as a way which will hopefully spur the audience on to want to read the individual journalists’ articles on the organisation’s website or in the print publication they actually have to pay for. 

One new practice to emerge in the television news media is the publication of individual stories as watchable videos directly in one’s twitter feed. These videos are ad-free and can be viewed completely free. 

Which begs the question, how are the media companies making any money off these videos? No ads and they effectively drive traffic away from their actual website. An example can be seen below. 



Around 50% of journalists are now using social media as their main source of information (ING, 2014).

The infiltration of social media into methods of collecting and disseminating news was no more on show than this week when professional rugby union player Israel Folau tweeted he wouldn’t be supporting same sex marriage.
The tweet sparked an online debate amongst users and was the source of further discussion and social media reactions from the general public. 

Given Falou’s high-profile identity and his public stance on the current news item, the BBC ran an online story about the situation using people’s tweets as their source of information. 

The article provides a clear indication of how the platform and practice of social media is now often becoming the story itself. 

Possetti (2013) concludes her chapter on the effects of social media on journalism with the suggestion that while ‘open verification’ is going to increase, applying careful research and investigation methods to social journalism is more important than ever, highlighting the importance of retaining traditional journalistic investigation principles when working with the tool of social media. 

References: 

ING. (2014). Study impact of social media on news: More crowd-checking, less fact-checking. Retrieved from 
https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/All-news/NW/2014-Study-impact-of-Social-Media-on-News-more-crowdchecking-less-factchecking.htm
 
Possetti, J. (2013). The Twitterisation of Investigative Journalism. In S. Tanner & N. Richardson (Eds.), Journalism research and investigation in a digital world. (pp. 88-100). South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

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