Can social media save the news media?

 

 

The news media faces huge challenges ahead. Social media has and will continue to change the way we find and consume news, and the news industry – which has proved less than nimble so far – needs to prepare or it risks becoming increasingly unprofitable.

Publishers are seeing an increasing number of us receiving our news through social media platforms. The Nieman Journalism Lab for big picture, crystal ball gazing on the future of journalism says 5-15 per cent of traffic to news websites is coming from social media referrals. This might not be a big percentage now but as more people take to social networks, the trend is on the way up. One US survey showed, 44 per cent of news readers use social networks to share news and information.

The buzz phrase for harnessing the power of social media to bring in punters is social media optimisation. It describes how the news media can adopt strategies to optimise the probability of their content being distributed through social media networks.

It stands to reason that news organisations need to harness this human impulse to share interesting stuff by making it easier for their content to be spread by social media networks. One way to prosper is to lead a reader or viewer’s attention from one story to another. Many news websites are very effective at doing this and other less so. But the trend does represent, as Ken Doctor of Newsonomics puts it, “the social web is the new homepage”.

While many news websites have Facebook and Twitter tabs on webpages to make sharing easy, it’s fair to say traditional news organisations have been patchy in coming to terms with the impact of the internet and how news consumption patterns and habits are changing. More and more news stories we are interested in find us through our social media filters and we also like to participate, to discuss the news online and to share it among our peers.

To increase audiences, news organisations and journalists need to learn to engage with them. Being open to feedback can improve the customer’s experience and grow loyalty for the news brand. One idea is for news organisations to encourage their journalists to use their social networks to bring more readers or viewers to a story and make it easy for them to share it.

Journalists also need training in social media. News rooms need to counter any curmudgeonly resistance by old school thinking because they now need staff adept at using social media to increase the organisation’s ability to engage and promote its news product.

News organisations also have to keep up with future developments. For example, many of us will soon be able to live stream news events from our mobile phones. We can already do it on a peer to peer basis but news from YouTube that it will be rolling out YouTube Live means we are so close to realising live streaming citizen journalism onto open internet platforms that can be viewed by anyone with reasonable access to the internet. How will the traditional news media cope?

In the last decade, we’ve been witnessing a slowly unfolding crash between the news industry and the internet. Now social media has added a high speed element. There are casualties especially in the US where dozens of newspapers have closed and hundreds of journalists have been made unemployed. But if your business is based on news, wouldn’t it be foolish to ignore or minimise an increasing part of the connected and literate world that is using social media to share the news?

Let us know your thoughts below. How do you get the news? Are Twitter, YouTube and Facebook increasingly doing it for you? What media organisations use social media effectively and how are they doing it?

And if you have bright ideas on how news organisations can generate more revenue from giving their news content away for free on the internet, I’m sure they would like to hear from you!

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Opinion | 12. Apr, 2011 | 10 Comments
Charles Mabbett

About the Author - Charles Mabbett

Charles Mabbett is a former media adviser at the Asia New Zealand Foundation and now SMNZ's Media and Eye On Asia editor. He was born in Malaysia and grew up in New Zealand. He has worked as a journalist for ten years and, as you can see, is a passionate adherent of social media and its capacity to forever change the way we communicate, and consume and use news. He also likes the music of Vampire Weekend a lot. You can connect with him on Twitter or you can reach him by email at [email protected]


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  • http://twitter.com/Commonrm The Common Room

    Nice article Charles, hot topic judging by #smcakl last night.

    I think your point about the networks’ need to “encourage their journalists to use their social networks to bring more readers or viewers to a story” is a really interesting one.

    I was having a conversation the other day with a PR friend who wondered if the flood of (particularly Mediaworks) journos on platforms like twitter and facebook, chattering away about life and dinner, will begin to undermine the integrity of these people as an authoritative news source?

    Do you see this as being a potential issue for the news media owners to watch out for?

    -Keren

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    • http://proseotalk.com Karen

      Do people see journalists as an authoritative news source in the first place? I seriously doubt it! I see the involvement of journos in social media platforms as being far more about crowd sourcing news than about promoting their version of it back to us, altho of course they will be doing both. As a PR person and a search marketer, having direct contact with journalists via social media is a distinct advantage and a means of making much smaller the gap between when I hear about news via Twitter, and when the mainstream online sources pick up the same news – the earthquakes being case in point.

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      • Charles Mabbett

        I think it is healthy to be skeptical about journalism but I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Whether we like it or not and whether we agree with the way stories are framed for the news consuming public, we all in some way depend on journalists to keep us informed. And you make a good observation about journalists’ using social media to crowd source stories. And I agree with you completely with your point about how social media (and user generated content coming directly from the public) also allows us to triangulate what we read in the news and now we often see it first before it is reported by media organisations. I don’t want to condemn my former profession because there are many dedicated hardworking journalists doing valuable work. But I think it is important to acknowledge there is a range in the quality of journalism. At its most basic, it is reporting – just the facts, ma’am. But excellent journalism depends on a degree of specialisation. One of the sad features of many news rooms today is that fewer and fewer journalists can devote themselves to doing rounds – and develop a thorough knowledge of a particular subject (eg Health, Education, Environment, Treaty Issues etc).

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      • http://twitter.com/Commonrm The Common Room

        I don’t know karen, I suspect there are a large contingent of NZ’ers that DO see (some) journos as an authoritative news source.

        For much of NZ, these people are still the ones holding the power to the news information. I’d even go so far as to say, when many people talk about “the media”, they’re not talking about Mediaworks or Fairfax, they’re talking about John Campbell and Hilary Barry. Making John and Mike and Hilary authorities in “News”.

        Regardless of this, I’m totally on board with the journos on SoMe platforms gathering news. I actually think they’re doing an awesome job and I, like you, find it really handy having them so close for contact and news-gathering reasons.

        I guess what I was trying to get at was more in regards to the journos using these platforms as normal people – talking about being stressed out after a long day, needing a drink, going to a gig with their mates. You know, just being people.

        I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Or even a nothing-thing. I’m just wondering aloud if being constantly reminded that journos are people too makes them more or less credible?

        Maybe it depends on what kind of reporting they do?

        -Keren

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      • http://proseotalk.com Karen

        I believe people do differentiate between news presenters and journalists, we know that news presenters are reading from autocue and in most instances are not the ones gathering the stories. I don’t have an issue in NZ reading their more personal type of tweets etc. I think audiences/media consumers are far more informed and sophisticated, and we no longer expect the faces of our news media to have that aura of invincibility. Any pretence at that is a joke to be honest … these are the days where celebrities are brought low every day by social media and other trad media (like women’s mags), and high profile journos are part of that.

        Charles, the reality that journos don’t have time to develop a specialist beat these days is very true, and one reason for PR people having to assume we know much more about whatever topic our clients are involved with than the journalist who may be writing the story. Which makes it even more crucial to provide all the relevant info, including background details, context of an industry etc, together in one place. Reduces the time and effort required for research, which we know will probably not happen anyway.

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      • Charles Mabbett

        Hi Karen, the fact is many news rooms are under resourced these days and reporters have to do a range of stories to tight deadlines as well as provide online print content for their organisation’s website.

        also i think it is probably necessary for the purposes of this discussion to distinguish between the news organisation’s institutional social media profiles and the individual journalists. One of the thoughts I had is that if a journalist is using his or her’s employer’s brand in their twitter or facebook profile, they are also linking their social media profile to the media organisation they work for. Imagine going for a drive in a car with TV3 signage all over it and driving recklessly. i think this analogy applies to the journalists that are using their media organisation’s brand as part of their individual brand.

        But i think that media organisations should be using their generic social media profiles to engage with audiences. And few media organisations do that.

        one of the big advantages for all of us of having journalists using social media is that we can direct messages at them in a very public way. I know that many young Egyptian activists directly targeted Western journalists on Twitter to get them to take notice of their perspective on events. And as a strategy this was very effective. Social media made the Western correspondents very accessible.

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    • Charles Mabbett

      wow! good points. media organisations need to have some oversight over how their journalists are using social media. I follow a great many journalists on Twitter and some of them use it in a very focused and work related way, while others lurk and listen for ground views and story tips, and others use it in a flippant and extroverted way. Social media is a very public space and any workplace training should include advice on its pitfalls because if a journalist embarrasses themselves (eg Mike McRoberts criticising his employer on Twitter over the network’s coverage of the first Christchurch earthquake) it can have repercussions for his or her relationship with the employer and with the public. But surely, if used well, a journalist can enhance their reputation and therefore that of the media organisation they represent.

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      • http://twitter.com/Commonrm The Common Room

        I tend to agree with you Charles, there’s awesome potential in these tools to build a really loyal audience based on the relationships consumers build with the journos and the sense of “insider knowledge” gained by watching these news professionals gather and build stories.

        I guess I’m interested in this issue in much the same way as I’m interested in the idea of “celebrity” being diluted by such free access to public characters.

        I wonder if there’s a sub-conscious association between authority or superiority (for lack of a better term) and a certain amount of detachement and mystery?

        As we gain an intimate knowledge of the inner lives of these public figures, will they begin to lose some of their aura of expertise? And is that sense of being bigger, smarter, more expert, more confident than they perhaps are in real life, part of what makes them trustworthy as a news source?

        I mean, maybe it’s simply that “telling the truth” is what makes journos trustworthy so the more human they become, the more trustworthy they are. But I’m a bit reluctant to believe our human psychology is quite that clear-cut.

        -Keren

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