The Social Web is changing the landscape of news reporting, so is it time for the News Media to go social?
ON JANUARY 15th 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 crash-landed on the Hudson River in New York City. Within seconds of the crash and with the plane sinking into the frozen river, Twitter users were posting the first reports and images of the disaster to the world. Social journalism was never so current.
All that Twitters is not Gold
Of course this isn’t the only time Twitter has scooped a major news story; in a similar case a month later Twitter user Jonathan Nip broke and followed the news of the Turkish Air disaster in Holland.
The growing prominence of the social web – which includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogger – has already had an important impact on the established news media. The 2008 American election was an online phenomenon.
Social Acceptance
On January 20th this year a third of all searches relating to the inauguration of President Obama included social networking terms such as “YouTube” and “Blogging”.
However, it wasn’t just the masses that used the social web during the election. It proved to be a great source for reporters; consider the speed at which the American news media found the MySpace page of Levi Johnston, the financé of Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter.
Social Roots
Barack Obama launched his successful presidential online campaign from his own battery of social media sites. Aided in no small way by his online campaign advisors Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, and Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Google. Undeniably, from these sites, grew the powerful and ultimately triumphant Obama grassroots campaign.
Post-election, President Obama’s social web campaign is still going; even as he was taking the oath of office on January 20th his staff were advancing his social-media strategy by creating the official Whitehouse YouTube and Twitter pages. While this is commendable in its democracy, this active engagement with the social-web allows Obama to craft and deliver a tightly controlled message directly into the homes of millions of Americans. In doing so, pulling audiences away from traditional news media and allows the Obama presidency to present every message without journalistic analysis.
Obama’s social networking campaign was no mom-and-pop affair and it is now going global. With new London offices Blue State Digital, the developers of Obamas’ online campaign, already manages several British trade unions as well as The British Labour Party’s online activities. This model fundamentally changes how people consume the news.
Social Welfare
The social web allows anyone with a connection to the internet the ability to generate, interpret and examine the news. However without an authoritative voice active on the social web the news is open to bias and misinformation. Larry Sanger the co-founder of Wikipedia is of the opinion that the online encyclopaedia is “broken beyond repair” due the inaccuracies in the user edited content. As a result journalists need a comprehensive knowledge of traditional media as well as the new digital trends and technologies. By understanding these various technologies and their uses the modern journalist can provide that authoritative voice and apply proper journalistic evaluation and enquiry to the news.
This is exactly what the New York Times and the British Guardian are now doing. While being active on Twitter and other social networks these newspapers have also made their back catalogues available to third party sites. Webmasters can now embed these papers articles into the sites they are developing. This allowed the newspapers to syndicate their content to a wider, more diverse, audience.
Future Society
With falling print advertising revenue and sales, both The Times and The Guardians’ vast investment in social media is commercially pragmatic. The plan is simple; the more online content they produce and syndicate, the greater their opportunity for generating ever-growing online revenue. Despite the economic downturn, the British Internet Advertising Bureau recently announced that online advertising is still the fastest growing area of revenue online, worth over $5 billion. The figures become more enticing when the mobile internet is considered. Google has announced that it expects to make more money from mobile web advertising over the next five years then it has made from the PC over the past ten years.
The social web need not be a threat to established news media. But these are early days and what has worked for the Obama campaign may not work for the New York Times. The challenge for the news media is to strike the balance between the social web and traditional media. Journalists, now more then ever, need to understand the technology of syndication while maintaining journalistic authority.