The Reuters Insti­tute for the Study of Jour­nal­ism at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, with the sup­port of the BBC Col­lege of Jour­nal­ism launched the work­ing paper by Nic New­man ‘The Rise of Social Media and its Impact on Main­stream Jour­nal­ism’ at Coun­cil Cham­ber, BBC Broad­cast­ing House in Lon­don on 30^th of Sep­tem­ber 2009.

BBC Broad­cast­ing House in London

Speak­ers and attendees

David Levy, Direc­tor of the Reuters Insti­tute led the dis­cus­sion together with Nick New­man him­self, Con­troller Future Media and Tech­nol­ogy in BBC Jour­nal­ism, Meg Pickard, Head of Social Media Devel­op­ment at Guardian News and Media and Kate Day Com­mu­nity Edi­tor at the Telegraph.

Speak­ers

The exact list of atten­dees was not made avail­able, how­ever most jour­nal­ists involved in the dis­cus­sion were respectable and val­ued main­stream jour­nal­ists. A smaller group of younger peo­ple instead rep­re­sented the cur­rent and upcom­ing online jour­nal­ism industry.

The dis­cus­sion

Most main­stream journalists´questions sounded in some way obvi­ous and were slightly sus­pi­cious about the effec­tive val­ues of engag­ing in social media.
Actu­ally, to find the non-sense of a highly pop­u­lated world, which is increas­ingly threat­en­ing the main­stream media and jour­nal­ism, makes strong sense and it is com­pletely  under­stand­able given the threat of poten­tial unem­ploy­ment or retire­ment and con­sid­er­ing  broad­cast jour­nal­ism revenue.

Attendee

The obvi­ous­ness of most ques­tions is due to the inverted roles which have been devel­op­ing in the media and tech­no­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment: the progress is devel­op­ing very fast, there­fore peo­ple are not learn­ing their pro­fes­sion from their par­ents. On the con­trary, they are learn­ing “on the field” and it is highly likely that they will learn even­tu­ally from their chil­dren.
In any case what peo­ple do not have to explain their chil­dren, they  strug­gle to explain to their parents.

So at some point it would be time to give up the weapons and to con­sider the gen­er­a­tion gap among jour­nal­ists as some­thing accept­able and some­thing from which it would be wise to start learn­ing in order to stay as active work­ers in the indus­try and to make valu­able room for new journalists.

Attendee

Learn­ing and lis­ten­ing from every­one is exactly the suc­cess key fac­tor of social media and blogs swarmed by online jour­nal­ists. Def­i­nitely, the con­cept of first hand infor­ma­tion has been devel­op­ing against the con­cept of jour­nal­ism as a lobby.

The value of engag­ing in social media

In view of this, most speak­ers´ answers were aimed at clar­i­fy­ing the value of engag­ing main­stream media in social media as an oppor­tu­nity to lis­ten to the read­ers´ voice and to learn what the read­ers, their final tar­get group, really want.

To the ques­tions “How is it pos­si­ble to gain money from social media, what is the added value in the engage­ment in social media?” Kate Day gave a sharp though polite answer explain­ing exten­sively that the way is to be com­ple­men­tary and not to replace online and offline news­pa­pers with social media.

Ques­tions and answers

As a mat­ter of fact the syn­ergy of media chan­nels is def­i­nitely con­verg­ing on the inter­net. Start­ing from that point, that syn­ergy is shar­ing its poten­tial with the entirety of the same media chan­nels and is rede­ploy­ing in dif­fer­ent media tools enriched through web func­tion­al­ity that are the most demanded prod­ucts in the mar­ket. For instance  web mobile phones, web tv, online news­pa­per, e-books etc.

Actu­ally the mar­ket and expen­di­ture them­selves are deter­min­ing fac­tors in such kinds of lobby issues and sweep away any pos­si­bil­ity of ignor­ing the real­ity of social media as the main part of the global con­ver­sa­tion, news­mak­ing and newsgathering.

Peo­ple won­der­ing if social media brings money to news­pa­pers are eas­ily answered that where are peo­ple, there is money.

Imag­ine an empty shop or bet­ter a shop where the clerks tell you every­thing about the shop but do not let you touch, explore, com­pare, get your own idea and under the best con­di­tions enjoy a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. It is highly likely that most peo­ple won´t buy and will left the shop to go to another shop where they would be free to do what they want. This is the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of news­pa­pers which are being left to pop­u­late social media.

In addi­tion to that, a prag­matic answer to the money mat­ter was given by Meg Pickard, who said that social media users num­ber in the mil­lions, influ­enc­ing other peo­ple and dri­ving traf­fic to newspapers.

Mul­ti­ple voices

Even­tu­ally the dis­cus­sion itself demon­strates that becom­ing expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ists does not imply stop­ping mak­ing com­par­isons and swap­ping opin­ions with new jour­nal­ists, con­sid­er­ing them trust­wor­thy and worth lis­ten­ing to.

As a mat­ter of fact, not lis­ten­ing to them implies not lis­ten­ing to the crowd of voices which are enrich­ing either news­pa­pers or people´s lives through social media and blogs.

None can stop these voices from being raised and from pan­demic spreading.

Mul­ti­ple voices

In fact, news­pa­pers are sup­posed to stop being one voice and start being part of the mul­ti­ple voices, prof­it­ing from them and using them as a mega­phone as Meg Pickard bril­liantly said.

Pend­ing answers

How­ever, there are ques­tions that main­stream jour­nal­ists did not pose and that are still pending:

-          To what extent do online jour­nal­ism, social media and blogs gain from being con­sid­ered impor­tant by main­stream media?

-          Does this engage­ment imply a free pass to news­gath­er­ing through blogs and social media?

Well, you are invited to answer these questions.

New sub­ject, new rules, new hopes

In con­clu­sion, it would be essen­tial to take into con­sid­er­a­tion that whereas it is true that online jour­nal­ism is going to find its def­i­n­i­tion, as a com­pletely inno­v­a­tive sub­ject, it is also meant to stay open in order to meet people´s chang­ing needs and progress as any suc­cess­ful and user-friendly web project does.

That impli­cates a rather impos­si­ble cat­e­gori­sa­tion within the pre­de­fined main­stream media rules and schemes.

To sum up, this quote of Mahatma Gandhi describes the con­di­tion of things and con­veys an expec­tant mes­sage: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Hope­fully, many more online jour­nal­ists, who are now play­ing the role of agents of change and inno­va­tors, will find a reward­ing and fit­ting place­ment in this new indus­try in the near future.

Some­thing stays, some­thing changes

Other arti­cles, videos and pod­cast about this topic:
- The rise of social media and its impact on main­stream jour­nal­ism by Car­o­line Beavon
- Social media and its impact on main­stream jour­nal­ism by Dan Davis