According to Wikipedia, social media is a term used to describe the type of media that is based on conversation and interaction between people online. In today’s society, the World Wide Web has changed the world and revolutionized how information is stored, published, searched and consumed. The ripple effect has spread so wide that it impacts not just businesses and industries but crosses over into politics, medicine, media and splits geographical locations, cultural boundaries and ultimately, affects people’s day to day lives. Social media is about networking and communicating through text, video, blogs, pictures, status updates on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or microblogs such as Twitter. Social media has become influential in journalism as a communication and news-breaking tool.
Today’s society has already seen some significant shifts in the media landscape, a factor that has public relations agencies evaluating how to change tactics when it comes to broadcasting their messages. Within the first two weeks of 2016, Postmedia announced 90 cuts and a strategy to consolidate major newsrooms across the country. Less than one week later, Rogers Media announced 200 cuts across their platforms or about 4 percent of the total workforce. Both of these announcements are a blow to an already floundering media industry, one faced with constant dwindling revenue and readership numbers.
Cuts like these are an indicator of how rapidly journalism is changing. There are numerous ways that public relations agencies are adapting to the changing media landscape. There used to be a time when a pitch note and a press release was enough to secure media coverage. However, with limited resources at newsrooms, and overworked journalists, this isn’t necessarily the case anymore. Public relations professionals are becoming the creators of content, quite literally drafting story ideas for specific outlets to use. It’s a much more symbiotic relationship between journalists and public relations professionals. This relationship requires more work and creativity from the public relations professional than in times past.
With fewer journalists available, the ‘citizen journalists’ or influencers are filling the gap. These individuals hold significant interest on social media and captivate an audience that considers them more authentic. While the rules of the game are still being sorted out, public relations agencies are taking a more active role in working with influencers to promote content and product placement.
Another aspect of a sparse media landscape is the loss of expert opinions. Seasoned journalists with backgrounds in different areas are becoming few and far between, and this leaves a void for creative opinions in various industries. The industry leaders themselves are filling that void, with more and more opportunity to land press coverage through thought leadership and well executed opinion pieces. Outlets are producing more of this type of content as it offers readers in-depth discussion from well-known industry experts. For public relations professionals, the shift in the industry has been a long time coming.
Technology hasn’t changed the need for a compelling story. The story should still be well-written and credibly sourced, however, digital tools offer new ways to tell the story. Digital content is delivered anytime, anywhere, to anyone on social media networks, television, radio, mobile phone or even tablets. In years to come, I believe digital content will be the future of news. I strongly believe that Twitter will become the news media outlet of the future. Twitter redefines and to some extent enlarges the definition of news media.
Twitter has quickly become an important tool for journalists. Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has been gaining popularity worldwide and media companies have been quick to explore its possibilities. When breaking news occurs in any part of the world, people who are using Twitter quickly agree on a tag that organizes the material comprising a hash mark and a short word. Once you have the hashtag, you can then use Twitter’s search engine to filter out everything but those tweets that are intending to comment on or report on a news event.
Four researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s Department of Computer Science have performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter and how it works. The group wanted to find out whether Twitter is just a social network or a news media outlet by itself. Haewoon Kwak and his associates Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park and Sue Moon built an array of twenty personal computers to trawl the entire contents of Twitter for a period of one month, July 2009. According to Kwak and his team, the role of traditional news media is played by traditional news accounts in Twitter. Moreover, based on their findings, these news accounts are more powerful than traditional news media for one specific reason. The study argues that for politically inattentive citizens, soft news is more effective than traditional news. Both a tweet and retweet among users puts Twitter ahead of other sources of news. Thus, Twitter can be an effective medium to disseminate political messages.
If the essence of today’s media landscape is about sharing and organizing, the essence of journalism is about being the voice of the community. Therefore, it is the journalist’s role to adapt and bring journalistic values to these social media environments to better serve the public interest. Journalism for its part is not dead but merely evolving and the journalists of the future need to reinvent themselves too. Whether they like it or not, the journalists of the future have to be more technology-savvy as news organizations become more digital-centric. Many journalism schools are already preparing their students for this certainty. In the United Kingdom, Birmingham City University began offering a Master of Arts Degree in social media in September 2009, exploring the techniques of social media. In the United States, Western Kentucky University wants students to be journalist-entrepreneurs and to think more about business. Its new iMedia certificate includes a course in interactive advertising.
If journalists are being required to change for a new and more social media landscape, newsrooms too will have to change accordingly. The graphics director of The Boston Globe, Javier Zarracina, said, “We need a multimedia newsroom to create content for the new formats” such as the tablets. He also suggested the need for a new workflow in the newsroom whereby a macro editor oversees a team of code developers, web and graphic designers that work alongside the photo editor, video editor, social media editor and the reporter. For the big media companies, it is about reorganizing newsrooms and undergoing a transformation process.
Good journalism has always been about networking because the best journalists have always listened, conversed and researched. There is still much to be learned about the social media revolution and we are still in the early days of experimentation. The changes happening in the news industry brought on by the rapid advances in technology should not be seen as a threat to traditional mass media but instead complementary in reaching targeted audiences in a world of personalized media by offering digital narratives and customizable news experiences that allow users to share and participate. For a long time, the conversation between mainstream media and the audience has been one-way even during the early days of the Internet. Then Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube came along and all of a sudden the audience can communicate back and give feedback. This is the current phase we are in.
In the next 10 years I believe we are going to witness another transition, where businesses including news organizations can capitalize on the conversation because new technology will allow them to better understand and quantify the audience in a multiplatform environment. In order for journalists of the future to adapt to the new media landscape, I strongly believe they need to master new types of skills. Multimedia is a major skill a journalist must master when it comes to photos, graphics and videos. Another skill a journalist must acquire is Adobe Flash when it comes to graphics software. Journalists will have to learn to work with an info-graphics team or a news visual design team to reinvent how to tell stories in digital platforms. By using these tools and skills, knowing the audience and their online and social media behavioral pattern will be the basis for future business models of news companies and their online advertisers.
It is inevitable that social media will change things either for better or worse but it will surely bring about transparency, accountability and a broader range of voices and viewpoints through a journalistic lens. Although for the journalist, the tide of change will also bring about pressures on the need for multi-skilling, ability to produce rapidly, having less capacity to reflect, having less time to write beautifully and possibly a shorter period to verify facts. These are challenging but exciting times, as both social media and the journalism practice are undergoing a revolutionary phase. Technological innovations are happening so fast, and the media industry is running to keep pace with them. While these World Wide Web innovations may be disruptive as most innovations are, this upheaval is a much needed one and a purifying change from which a better news media industry will emerge and new or hybrid forms of journalism will surface.
