Social News is Here

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What do you find more engaging: reading an article in a newspaper, or having a conversation about it with a friend afterwards? This is the question journalists, editors, and media executives should be asking themselves as they try to navigate through the current crisis in journalism. If you're like me, you find the conversation about current events more interesting than the consumption of news.

It appears that the Internet is facilitating an increase in expression, collaboration and conversation. The pattern is dispersed and uneven, but unmistakable. The current crisis in big business-supported journalism, coupled with the explosion of personal expression through online media, is fundamentally transforming journalism practices and giving way to the emergence of a more participatory form of journalism.

This is not just about new technologies or online tools, but rather new forms of journalism (and other practices) that are enabled by new online tools.

Social media is not journalism's competition

Social media and "professional" journalism are not mutually exclusive. I've previously detailed how the crisis in journalism is largly the result of big media itself and bad public policy. Comparing professional journalism and social media is like comparing the phone to broadcast news. Sure the phone hasn't enabled mass distribution of content the way the Internet has, but like social media, it is conversation based, participatory, and dynamic. Like the phone, social media should be considered a tool that professional journalists use, rather than their competition. This is exactly the approach the HuffingtonPost took when they developed their new Social News project, which encourages audience conversation through integration with Facebook.


Read the rest here: http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2009/09/09/SocialNews/

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He is a contributing author of Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times, Common Ground, Rabble.ca and Adbusters.

Reach me at:
steve@democraticmedia.ca
http://www.facebooksteve.com/
http://www.steveontwitter.com/
http://medialinkscolumn.com

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