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Social Media and the News
- 1. Social Media and the News By JACOB BLAIR
- 2. Abstract: • The way news is received by the general public has changed. If you want news fast, isn’t the best way to receive information based in the use of social media?
- 3. STARTING POINT • Let’s do a quick sampling of today’s audience…
- 4. HOMETOWN NEWS • Football, basketball and other sports scores can be tweeted or posted long before it is printed or broadcast. • City and local government meetings can be live- tweeted. • Snow days…
- 5. BREAKING NEWS • When did Twitter beat traditional news sources? • Arab Spring protests…ground photos, footage and accounts. • Miracle on the Hudson. • Brett Favre’s signing with the Minnesota Vikings. • Hurricane Sandy, people needed power to share news and cellular devices (when they had a signal) were the way to communicate.
- 6. SOCIAL MEDIA AND WEATHER ALERTS • The National Weather Service in Norman, Okla. conducted a “Facebook Tornado Drill” March 5, 2014 to see how many people would view the post in a set amount of time.
- 8. PUBLIC FEEDBACK • Social media, be it Facebook, Twitter or even Google+ gives the opportunity for nearly instantaneous responses. • For example, when news stations or newspapers receive breaking news photos or videos, they are able to get that quicker instead of waiting for it.
- 9. ETHICS AND CODES • A big thing about social media is reliability. • Maintain your presence professionally, be objective and not promoting political stances. • SPJ Guidelines for Social Media, “Use Common Sense.” • 2012 AP Stylebook, “Basic ethics still apply…”
- 10. EXAMPLE CORRECTION • Original Tweet: Kyle Busch will start first on Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway. • Correct Tweet: Kyle Busch will start first Sunday at Auto Club Speedway (Correction: Sprint Cup was at Bristol last week.)
- 11. THE DEATH OF TRADITION? • Hasn’t social media helped to kill off traditional news media?
- 13. WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
- 14. SOURCES • 10 news stories that broke on Twitter first. (n.d.). TechRadar. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/internet/10-news-stories-that-broke- on-twitter-first-719532 • Christian, D. (2012). Social Media Guidelines. Associated Press stylebook, 2012 (47th ed., p. 390). New York, NY: Associated Press. • Hurricane Sandy and Twitter. (n.d.). Pew Research Centers Journalism Project RSS. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://www.journalism.org/2012/11/06/hurricane-sandy- and-twitter/ • Mashable. (n.d.). Mashable. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://mashable.com/2009/08/18/mainstream-news-twitter/ • News Use Across Social Media Platforms. (n.d.). Pew Research Centers Journalism Project RSS. Retrieved March 16, 2014, from http://www.journalism.org/2013/11/14/news- use-across-social-media-platforms/ • Plunkett, J. (2012, February 8). Don't break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists told. Theguardian.com. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/08/twitter-bbc-journalists
Editor's Notes
- How many people follow a national news source (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Associated Press) on Twitter or Facebook? What about your local television or radio station? Lastly, what about your hometown or college newspaper?
- It used to be, when I was in high school, that if you weren’t at an athletic event or communicating with someone there, you had to wait for 11:20 p.m. Friday night for the sports section of the news to learn a football score or wait and read the paper that Saturday. If it was a city council meeting and you weren’t there, you had to wait a week to read it in the paper. Wanting to see if there’s a snow day for kids in Louisville, just read tweets from the Courier-Journal’s Toni Konz, she tweets at 4 a.m. on days they may cancel classes.
- Why do news sources break news on Twitter before putting up articles? According to Mashable, it’s to avoid being scooped, to create awareness and to reach new audiences. I read several articles and in quite a few circumstances, like when reporting Bin Laden’s death, it was an individual that broke news from a source, but then the wheels started spinning and multiple outlets jumped on the story. Well, social media users, even though they may get news first through their Twitter feed, they still use other traditional sources. According to an article by The Guardian, BBC journalists were actually warned about going straight to social media for breaking news. They wanted copy of stories first so it could be seen and shared by everyone. This is similar to how the AP and other modern newsrooms work, in the sense that copy is priority then tweeting, unless something is breaking news and information needs to get out at the moment.
- Given that the average lead time is only 15 minutes, less than 50,000 people saw the message. Nielsen market estimates for the Oklahoma City coverage area estimate about 718,000 HOUSEHOLDS for broadcast coverage. Let’s say every home in OKC has four people watching the 6 p.m. news and a tornado warning is issued, that’s 2,872,000. However, the National Weather Service and other broadcast media outlets still urge people to share weather alerts in the hope that it may save a life.
- The proper term for this is “crowdsourcing” where you take and utilize information given to you by viewers or readers, your “crowd.” During the EF-5 tornado that devastated Moore, Okla. Last year, people posted videos and weather reports to station’s social media pages. I wouldn’t have thought anymore of a tornadic storm on March 2, 2012 if I hadn’t seen the photo taken, posted and rebroadcast on a television station. This is what happened during Hurricane Sandy that was mentioned earlier with Twitter and people were giving ground, eye-level reports and news outlets were trying to get permission from everybody to use the stories.
- When it comes to reliability, not everything you see or hear is true. For reference, there was a research study done by Microsoft and Carnegie Melon University and a verified Twitter account has information that was ranked on average at a 3.9, with 1 being the lowest reliability and 5 being the highest. The Associated Press requires its reporters to check everything and confirm all of the sources before going online with a story. Journalists have to be careful because unlike Facebook where content can be changed, Twitter posts have to be removed and run with a correction.
- Based on the Pew Center’s research here…if anything we have a symbiotic relationship, especially when it comes to local television. The numbers seem to be a bit lower for print newspapers but let’s keep in mind the demographic for most newspapers and the regions they serve compared to the urban cities for local TV.
- What will social media and news reporting look like in five years. To be honest, I really don’t know. Based on the decline of print media, I do think that newspapers will have a greater online presence, if not entirely digital. I do think that social media will still be popular, but I think it will be even more mobile than the Facebook and Twitter apps we have now and the stories that are posted to social media will link to websites that will be “responsive,” meaning they adjust based on the size of the screen you are using but still maintain the same content. Content will be king and everybody will be fighting to get the content online first, and we’ll eventually see more of the social media wars. Thank you.