Powerpoint exploring the locations used in television show Time Clash
New Media Revolutionizes Journalism
1. new media: old wine in new bottles?
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Editor, Groundviews (www.groundviews.org)
2. what is social media?
• Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform
broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues
(many to many).
• It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming
people from content consumers into content producers. (Wikipedia)
3.
4. new media based journalism
• Glocal information – what is local anymore?
• Information agents are rapid moving, transnational and cellular
• A person in Cape Town can report on activities in Colombo who sources his
information from someone in Menik Farm who sends an SMS to a relative in
Australia who posts it to the web
• Models of news gathering and trust are changing
5. the revolution
Journalist Consumer
News as a package
Consumer /
Journalist
Witness
News as a conversation
6. what’s new
• Ubiquity of two way communications
• Addressable peoples, even those who IDPs or refugees
• Journalism tied to ICTs
• First stories come from citizens, who are the first witnesses to any event
• Low resolution content broadcast on high definition media
• Content from ordinary peoples juxtaposed with professional journalists
7. new media platforms and technologies
• Blogs
• Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace)
• Google Maps
• Mobiles: SMS, MMS, Mobile photography and video
• VoIP: Skype
• Underpinning the above is 3G HSPA wireless broadband and ADSL
14. bombings in london
• 7 July 2005
• Within 24 hours, the BBC had received
1,000 stills and videos, 3,000 texts and
20,000 e-mails.
15. “saffron revolution” in myanmar, 2007
• 100,000 people joined a Facebook group
supporting the monks
• No international TV crews allowed in the
country
• Mobile phone cameras were the first
footage of the monks protest
• Blogs from Rangoon were the only sources
of information
• The junta shut down all Internet and mobile
communications
18. the green revolution: post-election Iran, 2009
• Social media played three very important roles in the Iran situation:
1.It helped Iranians communicate with each other.
2.It helped Iranians communicate with the outside world.
3.It helped the rest of the world communicate with both Iranians and others
who sympathize with the protesters.
• YouTube and Flickr brought multimedia out of the distressed country. Twitter
and Facebook updates have spread videos virally. Blogs, Wikipedia, and
citizen journalism have helped disseminate and filter this information. Most of
all though, these tools have helped people take action.
41. Wikipedia: first narratives of the attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26_November_2008_Mumbai_attacks
400+ edits / updates
100+ authors
Less than 24 hours after first
attack
44. gmail account: email, maps, news
• Free, from www.gmail.com
• Access to Google Maps (mapping)
• Access to Google Reader (RSS / web updates)
• Access to Google News (news updates)
60. creating online content
• Think beyond text. Online is not print.
• Think beyond prose. Online can be satire.
• Think of photos, audio, video. Rich media tells stories.
• Think of SMS and crowd-sourcing
• Don’t suggest you know everything. Use the community to add value to story
• Link to other stories online
61. enduring challenges
• Impartial, accurate coverage still vital, increasingly hard to ascertain
• Torrent of information. Trickle of knowledge.
• Veracity hard to determine
• Pace of technology development hard to keep pace with
• Need some basic understanding of English