I'm going to attempt to make an excuse for journalists - perhaps not a very good one but still...
What would effective audience engagement even look like for individual journalists?
In an ideal working environment, should audience engagement even be an individual journalist's responsibility?
Organizations hire social media people to full-time positions because of the work it entails - wading through mentions, following fans of the organization, tweeting individual replies, etc. This is audience engagement and it’s become more than just another responsibility that can be tacked on to a list for someone who already has a full-time job reporting news and all that it entails.
I like that further into this reading, you observe that
"...social media activities take time to produce and nurture, but none of the newspapers interviewed seemed to offer journalists compensation for taking the time or making the effort to carry out these activities."
I think you hit the nail on the head.
For individual journalists, audience engagement might not even begin until they commit to constantly wading through their mentions on each tweet and following most of their prominent non-journo repliers. I imagine this enterprise would be very difficult for each individual journalist (especially the ones on a national level) to keep up.
A few more questions I had, reading through this study:
How is the DM function of twitter normalized and how does it factor into organizational expectations? Does the private nature of the tool make it hard to normalize or set expectations for?
In addition, I pose the same questions for follows, polls, opening up DMs publicly, retweets, faves, quoted tweets and the “retweets and faves not endorsements” trend for public figures on twitter.
When the reading states that few organizations have successfully gained substantial amount of readers willing to pay for content and lists the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, I immediately wanted to know the average economic status of these publications' reading audiences and how it might affect paying intent.
Lastly, there's an often paraphrased quote that a lie travels around the world before the truth gets a chance to even put its shoes on. I bring this up to ask about what standards, if any, exist for making editorial corrections on twitter.
The publish first, correct later philosophy makes me wonder about what “correct” really means on twitter. What are the rules? In newspapers, from what I know, corrections are acknowledged in footnotes if it’s an online-only article and on the next issue of the publication if it’s a printed piece. What does a “correction” look like on twitter: does it involve deleting an erroneous tweet? Is simply tweeting a correction and an acknowledgement that a previous tweet was made in error enough if the erroneous tweet is still up? Which is the most ethical course of action? Twitter has a newly proposed feature that could make tweets editable after they've been posted. How would journalists make use of this feature if it were to eventually be adopted?
THIS IS NOT AN INTERVIEW WITH BANKSY
I checked twitter this morning and the number one trending topic was "El Chapo." I clicked on the topic and I was unsurprised to find that many had fallen yet again for another abcnews.com.co ruse and been led to a story about how El Chapo had escaped yet again from captivity.
As reported in this article, abcnews.com.co has in the past been responsible for many hoax news stories. At some point, you have to wonder if the fault lies with the audience rather than the publishers of said hoax stories.
I frequently visit the AV Club - a sister site of The Onion so I'm pretty partial to The Onion as the reigning champion of news satire but still, I can't fault outfits like abcnews.com.co or The National Report for wanting to capitalize on people's inabilities to see past their biases, even if a lot of the "news stories" that result from it can't truly be categorized as satire.
Many times, I've caught myself laughing at the embarrassment that ensues when reputable news organizations fall for these so-called news sites and I've had to recalibrate because the percentage of my enjoyment of The Onion that relies on checking to see how often people fall for it is very little. In my view, true satire should be funny on its own without people mistaking it as real news. With sites like the National Report, almost all the humor for me stems from how much it manages to constantly embarrass audiences and news organizations that fall for it. I'm not saying it isn't funny but at the same time, I'm not saying it isn't wrong.
EASE OF ALTERCATION CREATES WOES FOR PICTURE EDITORS
As someone with a background in graphic design whose daily work duties involve firing up photoshop every now and then, I have to play just the tiniest violin for all the photojournalists mentioned in this reading to have lost their jobs over becoming too overzealous with their prowess in photoshop.
I'm not a journalist and I know very little about the industry but even I know when you cross the line from enhancing an image for the sake of clarity to out and out deception.
Something I did find interesting in the reading was the passage where it is alluded to that some directors of photography require that their photojournalists inform them on all the alterations they make to the image and why. Working in photoshop for years now, I know fairly well about the "History" panel that lists in order every step you take when working on a file. I'm not advocating for this to be implemented globally but Adobe (the software company that licenses Photoshop) could build a feature off the "History" panel that informs a designated person within an organization whenever certain actions are exerted on an image. They could make the feature available only in editions licensed to news organizations. That designated person would be the director of photography.
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