News of The New York Times hiring it’s first ever “social media” editor has created waves everywhere. The leaked email tell us about her role (via Venturebeat). As soon as the news was made public, questions suddenly arose starting right from does it really need one? Or why hire an insider and not an external consultant? While that is debatable, one certainly can’t deny the impact that social media has had in the newsroom.
Balanarayan (@chupchap) over at DNA says “Social media hasn’t really affected news room to be honest.. but it has changed the way the media houses perceives readers, their wants, expectations. We try to make the news a little more crisp and chatty. Apart from that there haven’t been much of a change. New agencies always had this concept of giving one-liner breaking news alerts, now we see that the concept has been democratized with twitter.” He along with others at DNA man the DNA twitter account (@DNA) which operates slightly differently from twitter accounts of conventional newspapers. For one, its definitely much more interactive and doesn’t just share links.
NYT agrees that one reason they hired a social media editor is because a sizeable amount of inbound traffic to their portal is due to Twitter.
But what about using social media to create content?
Social media played a substantial role in reporting events over the past 2 years. For example during the terrorist attack in Mumbai last November, a lot of newspapers were actively scanning twitter for updates. However this does have a dark side to it as well. Because of the social media channel for extracting information, it becomes all the very important to verify sources. Speaking of the Terrorist attacks, there were a few embarrasing moments where false information was reported by reputed companies thus jeopardizing their crediblity.
A lot of people also feel that while social media certainly adds a new dimension to reporting but solely using new media isn’t the solution. It works best when used to find alternative sources to a story. Scanning through someone’s Myspace profile or someone’s blog or twitter stream certainly gives you access to information which you would not have access to in general, but at the same time people can exaggerate here as well.
Social media also adds as an excellent tool to get leads to a story and for brainstorming of newer ideas.
What about the journalists themselves?
As is the case in any job, what you post online is visible to everyone else. We have all heard of the Cisco fatty story by now. From what it seems a lot of media firms have made it clear to their employees that there is no such thing as a personal life. Due to the open nature of social networks (yes, that includes the walled city of Facebook as well), the image they portray there also affects the image of the organization that they are affiliated to. So if you bitch about a rival company today, tomorrow the quote might come to bite you when you’re shifting jobs (thanks to the google cache).
So what do you think? Join the discussion below
