JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA Ian Reeves PHASES OF

JOURNALISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA Ian Reeves

PHASES OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION – THE ‘FIFTH ESTATE’ Message boards and community forums (1995 onwards) Blogging (2001 onwards) Social media and social networks (2006 onwards)

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? Difficult term to pin down precisely, but incorporates: some blogging social networking Microblogging Recommendation sites User content sharing

CORE PRINCIPLES Participation Collective Transparency Independence

WHAT MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN GAIN Telling better stories – there is always someone who knows more than you do Making better relationships – engaged users are more loyal, and more attractive to advertisers. They may even pay Attracting new users Breaking news leads and tip-offs

TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA USED BY MAINSTREAM MEDIA Message boards Comments on stories News UGC Non-news UGC Commissioned Blogs Reader blogs User-generated data User questions Member spaces Member recommendations Off-site engagement Microblogs

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS In 2008, Facebook had fewer users than CNN. com Now it dwarfs it by more than 25 x Social networks easily outperform news sites in terms of engagement – see Alexa. com to make comparisons 20 per cent of all internet time is spent on them Average daily time on Facebook is 30 mins – 25 minutes more than most news sites Telegraph gets 10 percent of traffic from social media sites In February 2011 Twitter delivered 26% of all clickthroughs to UK news web sites

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS TO JOURNALISM Finding people – essentially crowdsourcing the pubic for information on the whereabouts of witnesses or other key figures in a story; People who self-publish – activists (holding regimes to account), bloggers or anyone in need of a voice who would otherwise not be given a voice; Big events – the London riots was an excellent example of how journalists could harness the power of Twitter to follow leads and chase down stories. The ensuing chaos was too big and too fast-moving for journalists to manage on their own; The butterfly effect – a small action creating a ripple effect. It has to be a tweet containing very valuable information, which can be hard with 140 characters. One example would be the tweet that broke the Ryan Giggs super-injunction.

HOW CAN IT AFFECT NEWS COVERAGE? Iranian street protests of 2009

IRANIAN PROTESTS: SOCIAL MEDIA DILEMMAS Huge amount of noise and false information – eg reports of 3 m protestors (when only a few hundred thousand); Mousavi ‘house arrest’; president of monitoring committee ‘declared election invalid. ’ Little balance – conversation overwhelmingly in favour of Mousavi Self-selecting group, largely from liberal elite

IRAN PROTESTS: DIRECT BENEFITS Extended newsgathering possibilities – pictures and story leads Accumulation of ‘kudos’ within social media communities, plus traffic gains from links Relative simplicity of monitoring multiple news sources

SOCIAL MEDIA STORIES G 20 protests – amateur video of Ian Tomlinson being pushed by policeman Mumbai terrorist attacks – people tweeting from hotel rooms as gunmen rampaged Norwegian shootings by Anders Breivik Trafigura, Ryan Giggs super-injunctions London riots

IMPORTANT CAVEATS Usage of social media sites is highly uneven – beware thinking it is representative The 90 -9 -1 rule of participation inequality holds

IMPORTANT CAVEATS Importance of Twitter can be overstated. It has 100 million active users out of global population of 7 bn.

IMPORTANT CAVEATS “People very often don’t want a conversation. People’s interest in media is very often as background. The earliest investigations into media going back the foundation of Gallup indicate that people are not as absorbed in media as the creators of media. “ – Adrian Monck.

SOCIAL MEDIA – FURTHER READING AND VIEWING Dan Gillmor – We, the media (full copies in library) Antony Bradley – A New Definition of Social Media Rusbridger video on Future of Journalism Clay Shirky – How social media can make history BBC social media guidelines Twitter and journalism Journalism and Social Media: 15 Examples Worth Learning From