Seasoned journalists embrace the rise of social media with trepidation, enthusiasm
Cecily Hilleary doesn’t write: she tweets.
“Traditional media is dead,” said Hilleary, senior reporter with the Voice of America. “No matter how much people are kicking and screaming, we won’t go back.”
While not yet dead, much of traditional media does appear to be circling the drain, as subscribers and viewers increasingly turn to social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, for the news they want.
Newspapers continue to experience a decline in paid subscriptions and advertising revenues, according to The State of the News Media 2012, a report released in March by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Network news programs, including the evening news, morning news shows, and news magazines, have experienced similar declines in viewership. Traditional radio is also on the wane.
In contrast, the number of people using social media continues to increase rapidly. In just one year – between 2010 and 2011 – the number of Facebook users worldwide increased by more than two-thirds, from 500 million to 845 million. The 24 million users of Twitter in the United States is projected to be more than 35 million by 2014, according to the center’s report.
Hilleary has worked for more than 15 years as a news journalist, focusing on the Middle East. To reach out to both her audience and her sources, Hilleary uses Twitter “exclusively” in her work at the Voice of America, the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. She also aggregates tweets by others into threads, or social streams. Hilleary recently captured the thoughts of protesters in Jordan as they rallied against a spike in fuel prices and the response by Palestinians on the vote by the United Nations General Assembly giving the Palestinian Authority non-member observer status.
While Hilleary has embraced social media – it makes her job easier and quicker – she recognizes that the transition has not been easy for many of her colleagues. As a discipline, journalism is evolving quickly, said Hilleary. If journalists don’t keep up, they risk becoming obsolete.
“People are resistant to change,” said Hilleary. “For many journalists, this is a huge leap. A lot of newsrooms are struggling to get people to make the transition and understand why it is valuable.”
Changing the Business of Reporting
One reason why some journalists may resist adopting social media: its fundamentally changing the way they do their job.
Today, many journalists are constantly tweeting or blogging “bits of news,” said Chris Adams, investigative reporter with McClatchy Newspapers. Before, journalists would work throughout the day on a news story and then send it to an editor before it was published.
An award-winning reporter, Adams has worked in print media for more than 24 years, writing on topics as varied as veterans’ disability claims, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the use of chimpanzees in medical research. Adams form of investigative journalism does not rely on social media. However, he has seen the impact it has had on both the quantity and quality of work done by other journalists.
“It’s causing them to rapidly accelerate when and where they print something, rushing to print in ways they weren’t a decade ago,” said Adams. “It produces more sloppy news for the consumer.”
The adoption of social media tools in the newsroom has also expanded the duties of reporters. In addition to traditional news sources such as wire services, journalists need to monitor more and more web sites, aggregated through social media sites such as Twitter, and then pass that information on to their audience through their own social media accounts, said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center.
“That takes time,” said Cohn. “Depending on the reporter, this can offer an advantage by giving a broader range of platforms but make journalists feel rushed.”
Cohn worked at The Washington Post for 21 years, focusing on demographic issues and was the lead reporter for the 2000 Census. She runs a blog called “All Things Census,” which posts articles about census methods, findings and resources, and a Twitter feed, both for the Pew Research Center.
Many news organizations also now expect journalists to use social media to further promote the work of their agencies – and themselves. “Most journalists are expected to be promotional of their work as they never were before,” said Jessica Stahl, digital and social media producer with the Voice of America. “Personal branding is being actively encouraged by organizations.”
And it’s easy for reporters to become Twitter celebrities, said Stahl, who has worked in social media for the last four years. Trained in print journalism, Stahl also runs The Student Union, a blog on international students in the United States.
But the push to tweet quickly and often can have its drawbacks. “It makes journalism a little harder because it puts more of what we say under a microscope and it is easy to say things that offend or go beyond journalistic ethics,” said Stahl.
This can be especially true if journalists apply different rules to their professional conduct depending on the medium they are using. When journalists use Twitter, they will often change their standards, said Adams, rather than using the standards they normally would if they were doing a straight broadcast piece.
New Avenues for Sources and Information
Regardless of the angst among many journalists created by the rise of social media, they are increasingly adopting the tools in their work.
According to the 2011 Survey of Media in the Wired World, 75 percent of journalists use Facebook and 69 percent use Twitter in their reporting. In addition, 68 percent of those surveyed said their reliance on social media has increased significantly. The survey of 200 journalists is fielded annually by Middleburg Communications, a public relations and social media agency, and the Society for New Communication Research, a think tank focusing on new media and communications.
Easier access to sources and information are two of the most significant advantages offered to journalists by these new tools.
Social media represents new avenues to reach out to sources and to see the “information out there,” Adams said. Sometimes, reporters can get more information from Facebook and Twitter than from calling and interviewing only a few people. “It also allows us to be more interactive and have a relationship with our audience,” said Adams, “rather than dictating what we think is news.”
Another opportunity offered by social media: the ability to understand what people are interested in at any given moment. “We can tap into the Zeitgeist of the world,” said Stahl. Social media can show journalists what people want to know so they can go after those stories that resonate with their audiences.
Linking social media with content that is explicitly interactive also enables journalists to tell stories in ways they couldn’t before.
“There are a lot of stories that we journalists can tell more authoritatively,” said Stahl, “but there are also stories our audience can tell better than we can. The aggregate of their voices can create something compelling.”
An interactive project by the Voice of America — What’s Your 9/11? — asked members of its international audience to send in stories about events that affected their countries in ways similar to how the 9/11 terrorist attacks did the United States.
What resulted was a composite story – bigger than any one contribution – that showed how the world has been changed by different events. “A single reporter could not have created this alone,” said Stahl.
Future Trends in Story Formats
Stahl believes that social media is beginning to develop it’s natural place in the newsroom. Initially, there were “a lot of dumb uses with it,” such as a web site running twitter streams or cable news networks running hashtags under broadcasts. This didn’t help people understand how to use social media, said Stahl, and many organizations were using it just for the sake of it.
The industry is now seeing a lot more curation activities, said Stahl, where journalists are mining the data and information uploaded to social media sites then using it to create stories their audiences want but have never seen before. The use of social media to assess voter preferences before the 2012 elections is a good example of this.
Journalists are also increasingly likely to present information in ways that go beyond the traditional article or broadcast story formats that audiences have come to expect.
“Digital platforms are more flexible and incorporate different media,” said Stahl. “People are thinking about ways to bring those elements together and tell stories that are better ways to communicate and get points across without being locked into models we are used to.”
Adams agrees that the traditional models used by journalists to communicate stories are changing.
“It is hard to predict what will happen,” said Adams, “except more and more news and more and more formats. Ten years from now, we won’t get news delivered in the standard news format with a lead and 750 or more words of copy.”
Elizabeth M. Grieco
American University
December 15, 2012
“I don’t complain about the new forms of journalism. I think every generation of journalists has new challenges and new audiences that they have to meet halfway. Social media is one for this current generation.”
D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center