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25 January 2010
Posted in
Social Media
Is social media threatening traditional news media outlets? News of a social media experiment, concerning this subject, has arisen to test the usefulness of social networking sites as a means of finding news. There will be five radio station reporters locked in a French farmhouse with no way to access news other than through social networking sites.
The five reporters are from Canada, France, Belgium and Switzerland, but I do not know which country has two reporters in the experiment. They are: Benjamin Muller from Paris, Janic Tremblay from Montréal, Anne-Paule Martin and Nicolas Willems, who’s nationality/ hometown is unknown, and a mysterious person with a cartoon man as his picture, only known by his first name, Zizou, and his screen name, Zizou78700. We don’t know where he comes from or what’s the reason behind the numbers 78700, it's a little strange there’s no other info on this guy. Its common sense that this experiment is set for a bumpy ride as it’s easily said that news has spread quickly, and people will probably spread some shocking false info as news just to mess with the reporters’ heads, but if they manage to notice this then it will just further prove their aims of the experiment. They can also be followed on twitter.
What is really in question here is not to gauge how easy it is to get news through social networking sites but how credible this ‘news’ or information is, that is contained on the social networking sites. It is true that there always is a lot of fake info and news travelling about on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
One thing people are forgetting, though, is that usually, these social networking sites are just a platform for updates where ‘traditional’ news companies post new articles and news from their sites so it is easier to attract fans. And these usually have links to get the whole message across as you can only fit a small amount of it in on Facebook/Twitter pages or groups. But allegedly the reporters’ are allowed to follow any of these links, but these linked pages, Facebook and Twitter are the only parts of the web they are allowed to look at.
It's unlikely that social networking sites will be proven useless for finding news because of this. But even with that said, social media doesn’t threaten normal media, as social media, in some ways, relies on normal media being around. So social media just complements normal media and gives ordinary people a way to get involved.
Some stories will actually pop up on social media first and that is a source for the traditional channels in which news is delivered because information is leaked accidentally on social media in the same ways as in real life. So if it's worthy of being in the news then it might be worth checking the facts out first but it is worth using and may actually be very valuable. But the reason people can rely on social media to find news and info is because there are some people who are out there to spread news and to the majority of people, news is an important subject. A survey in late 09 showed that news is a top priority for the most people on Twitter. There will be some news that doesn’t get on to social media, albeit a very small amount of it, but social media is there for people to openly discuss news and other types of media as well as just social interaction, and that gives a better, clearer picture on all news subjects.
Traditional news outlets only tend to give a view that is from one main perspective, even if an outlet tried to cover all point from the perspective of everyone, they can only do that from everyone’s point as a whole, and open discussion will always raise other points and other perspectives, it's something that no traditional news outlet can deliver. And that’s why social media will always be important and only ever complementary to traditional media and news outlets.
If there were no traditional news outlets, then the credibility of information would be much harder to measure, and people will always require that confirmation that they seem to find with the more credible traditional news outlets. That kind of credibility is impossibly hard to gain for ordinary people on social media, and that makes social media an invaluable tool for traditional news outlet companies to spread their credible information and then to find viewpoints that would not normally be noticed by them.
