Before I start, I just want to say that researching social media does nothing for my desire to be sociable!
That said we have 2 weeks to create an amazing presentation and sell it to the rest of the group, so I might wait a fortnight before I crawl under a rock and unsubscribe from all the feeds which are currently cluttering up my inbox!
So Charlotte has said that we have to tighten the angle of our research to answer the question she set us – how is news being affected by social media or something like that. I know Tommy has had a good idea of producing a graphic depicting how the way news is told has changed over the years, but is this the only angle we are exploring?
In his post MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism, Kai flagged up the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet podcast. Along with Andrew Keen, they also talked about the ‘news aggregator’ site, Digg.
Digg, if you haven’t heard of it before, is basically a social bookmarking site which specialises in news stories. The idea is that when you read a news story that you like you ‘digg it’ which then pushes it up the running order. The most popular stories appear on the front page and the least popular are buried. What makes it interesting is the way the most popular stories differ from those appearing on the front pages of the traditional press. In a way it goes back to the whole Madeleine McCann / Sky issue and also relates to what Paul said about the readers of his newspaper.
Similarly, the @alltweetjournal has been set up to allow those who tweet regularly to ‘share their news with a wider audience,’
Presentation minded…
This might take a little organisation but I was basically thinking we could produce a short video – like a 90 seconds rolling news bulletin or something similar – containing only the news stories that Digg or this new Twitter paper have covered. In other words, producing a purely social media generated news bully. We could ask Denis if we can use the virtual reality studio or maybe do a quick pre-rec once Live@5 has been transmitted?
What do you think?
On a completely unrelated note, @gabizago flagged up this article, which basically states that ‘Twitter journalism’ isn’t going to change anything. Whilst it is really interesting, it is, unfortunately, in Portuguese (and the Brazilian variant at that) so it is taking a little while to translate. Nonetheless, I think the basic gist is covered in the first few paragraphs, which I have translated for you here. [While I’m at home and reunited with my dictionary, I’ll try and paraphrase the rest – it’s a little long for an exact translation!] I really would suggest that you read it since it’s an opposing view to what we have previously been discussing.
On the flip side, I noticed that @channel4 were using Twitter to generate UGC and comments about #uksnow. (Using Web 2.0 to reach the general viewing public rather than put on hat and go out into the snowy streets and find them themselves.) Journalism.co.uk has written an impassioned piece explaining why Twitter is not a lazy alternative to voxpops. It’s as you said Tommy, rather than relying on a computer, it is always preferable to ring someone up or talk to them face to face!
I know I mentioned that I was writing a piece on the complaint about journalists lifting photos/ videos off MySpace etc which was upheld by the PCC. At the moment that has gone on hold – it got really complicated, but I’ll try and get something together before next week… or anyone else can steal the idea if you fancy it! (Search through my del.icio.us links for the relevant articles. The privacy issue is also mentioned in the journalism.co.uk article mentioned above.)
See you when I get back to the Fal, and sorry for missing our meeting this morning (doubly sorry since I was the one who asked for it!)
Social Media Monkey 