Social media has become a revolution in today’s news-hungry world. Consider this statement for a minute. Does it mean the phrase ‘news reporting’ has taken on a completely new connotation? The truth is – it has. Social media has quickly proliferated into newsrooms and television channels and journalism today employs a new set of tools – Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. Not only are these tools highly effective and time bound; they have provided a platform for newsmakers and journalists to get to the bottom of the news in a manner that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Consider this: news of all major happenings around the world – be it a celebrity’s announcement of her impending motherhood, a high-profile Government official’s out-of-office scandalous affair, or a disastrous calamity spewed by Nature – manages to first reach the social media sphere before it finds its way to newspapers or television news channels. This fact itself is big proof of the immediacy and wide reach of social networks right into the heart of the news as it happens and as soon as it happens. This trend can be attributed to the emerging concept of citizen journalism, where journalism heavily relies on crowdsourcing to quickly get to where the news is.
Journalists are particularly fond of Twitter as a news publishing tool, especially since breaking news can be instantly broadcast to a wider audience spread across geographies. While Facebook as a newsworthy tool is yet to gain prominence, Twitter has successfully leveraged its attributes of being a broadcast social networking service, thereby enabling news reporters and journalists to track national and international events as they happen and publish news stories instantly.
Another benefit of social networking is that newsmakers can use this personal interaction with their target readership to build their newsworthiness and credibility. A single news item posted on Twitter or Facebook or blogged about in the blogosphere is sure to generate engaging comments from readers, and journalists as efficient community managers can tap into this conversation and safeguard their readership loyalty.
These days, newsrooms and newspapers are employing a separate category of media professionals to handle their social presence and manage their news communities on Facebook, Twitter, and news blogs. This goes to show that news media today has started recognizing the power of social networking to acquire and disseminate information. In a digital age where people have access to content on their smartphones and other handheld devices, the move to social media as a news publishing medium is well worth the investment.
Finally, journalism is all about people interaction, and social media offers an interesting perspective on communication between the three primary categories of news people – the ones that make the news, the ones that break the news, and the ones that take the news.
