Social Media and
Journalism:
After reading Dr. Lee’s paper on Social Media and
Speed-driven Journalism, I found that her research seems to support my opinion
that social media is not saving journalism in the way that it is hyped up to
be. As written in the paper, “the
question that news organizations should center on is value creation, not
mindless technology or social media adoption (232).” Especially on TV news, you
see so much use of flashy graphics and dramatic music. It seems like network
news, in some cases, is more concerned with using the latest technology than
getting all the details right in their breaking stories.
I have the same problem with the use of Twitter in some
network news. While I suppose I see where the idea might have come from, I don’t
think including random viewers’ opinions on the stories of the week (and the
newscasters themselves) counts as newsworthy. It seems this functions almost
more as a time filler than actual news. While it may engage the handful of
users they whose tweets they choose to read, for the most part I think it is
just wishful thinking on their part in terms of engaging the audience.
Particularly because the newscasters don’t appear to take the segment
seriously. They almost look as if they think it is a waste of time or a time
filler as well.
As for the respondents to the survey who used Twitter as a
tool to do their job, I think this is the direction that journalism should be
going in terms of how it uses social media. Some of the respondents talked
about how they used social media as a resource to do research for their
stories, like in the example of the murder cases involving local teenagers. In
this case, Twitter helped lead journalists to students who knew the victim and
alleged murderers and uncover sources and information which could then be
verified with the police. This kind of use of social media, as a resource for
resource and as a way of monitoring public opinion and developing stories for
use in developing one’s own report, I think are valuable. Reading off inflammatory,
ungrammatical tweets about the latest hot buttons issues, or worse, the
newscaster’s personality, are, on the other hand, not.
Thoughts on
Canadian Reporting of Breaking News
Unfortunately, while there are certainly some journalists
that are using social media in this way - in a way that is contributory and
valuable - for the most part what we see is the other kind. The flashy, token
kind of adaptation of social media. I
think that’s why the differences in Canadian reporting were so shocking to the
writers of the article on Kractivism. Certainly there are plenty of journalists
in the United States who are on par with Peter Mansbridge, but the fact is that
we have become so used to the flashy, dramatic, self-promotion,
say-it-now-and-check-the-facts-later approach used in one too many national mainstream
media networks like FOX, CNN and NBC that his approach is shocking to us and
that is just sad. For example, I
recently watched an interview on FOX with the men who were actually present in
Benghazi in 2012 and on whose experience’s the movie 13 hours is based.
Throughout the interview, I couldn’t help notice how often the interviewer kept
drawing the attention back to herself and FOX news and promoting the network
instead of keeping the focus on the story that they were reporting. Even simply
as a viewer, this really bothered me. Especially
on a topic such as this, this seems like a time for Mansbridge’s quiet and
somber tone. That would have seemed proper. This reporter instead seemed
over-eager and almost shamelessly self-promotional.
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