Is The Power Of Social Media For The Media?

It’s easy to forget how much we depend on newspapers and the news, but how important are they really these days? In an age where everything gets delivered digitally, how can you get the news from your newspaper or magazine these days? It used to be enough just to read the news, but now more people are getting into digital news – it’s fast, it’s convenient and it comes from all over the world, so it’s not matter which quarter you live in. If you want to find out about something happening in any part of the world, then you need to check out what’s going on with the news.

The good news, for people looking for some silver lining, is this latest loss came at the end of October and not just January. The bad news is newspapers and magazines are in real trouble, with financial problems and their assets like libraries being taken over by investors. For some readers this might be good news as newspapers would benefit from increasing their news value, but for many readers it will make no difference: if they want to know what’s going on then they have to read the news anyway. If you want quick and concise information, the news is good, but for the millions who rely on newspapers and magazines to keep them informed, news will mean nothing. So what can they do to improve their news value?

Well, it seems that one answer lies in turning to social media – websites such as Twitter and Facebook can influence the news far more than the actual Newswire. By using the tools Twitter offers, such as “followers” and “friends,” journalists can follow up on their friends’ or followers tweets and use these to create stories, or perhaps write feature stories based on the comments of the followers. A Twitter search for a particular topic could return a list of links to stories based on a keyword phrase recently searched for. If a journalist can get a hold of this traffic and use it to get scoop after scoop, then maybe the Internet’s endless resource of news will be truly benefit the public at large.