Social media and the changing face of Journalism
Just came across a great post from Mercedes Bunz on How Social Networking is changing Journalism. The post is based on the Oxford Social Media Convention which took place earlier this September. I've reproduced some important points from the piece below:
Richard Sambrook, the director of the BBC Global News Division, said that the impact of social media was overestimated in the short term and underestimated in long term.
...Organisations don't own the news anymore. There is a transformation for the journalist from being the gatekeeper of information to sharing it in a public space.
Information is not journalism...You get a lot of things, when you open up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism. Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context, he pointed out, and therefore for him it is still a profession. The value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation - and that makes the difference.
The post also cites John Kelly, a columnist for the Washington Post, who recently published a report on the challenges and value of citizen journalism. At the conferenced he noted that the HuffingtonPost competes with the Washington Post not in terms of journalism, but in terms of its readers.
For more see John Kelly's report at Red Kayaks and Hidden Gold: the rise, challenges and value of citizen journalism.
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