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THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM

Writer's picture: Mbali Tebele Mbali Tebele

Updated: Dec 1, 2022

BY MBALI TEBELE

Social media journalism


What is social media journalism?

The impact of social media journalism

The negative impact of social media journalism

The positive impact of social media journalism

How will it change the way we report in the future?


What is social media journalism



  • Professional journalism

  • Open publishing platform

  • Media and technology

Impact of social media journalism



  • Target market

  • Transformation

  • Broadcasting


Negative impact of social media journalism



  • Fake news

  • Unreliable sources

  • Competition

  • Digital divide

  • PR pros

Positive impact of social media on journalism



Increased access to media

Alarms modern business models

Multidimensional media

Communication is quick

Adaptation of trends

But:

Data is not cheap

No free Wi-Fi

Everyone is a blogger

Addictive


The changes we should anticipate in the future when reporting.

  • Collaborative Reporting

Reporting has always in some ways been a collaborative process between journalists and their sources. But increasingly, there's a merger between the source and the content producer.

As a result, more journalism will happen through collaborative reporting, where the witness of the news becomes the reporter.

This requires a shift in the mind-set of journalists, who are used to deciding what news is and how it is covered, produced and distributed

  • Journalists as Community Managers

Journalism has often been done from the top of a mountain — journalists would tell the community what they need to know. In the future, much of the news will become a conversation, and journalists will be required to do as much listening to the community as they broadcast to them.

  • The Social Beat

A journalist's future beat of coverage and rolodex of contacts will, and in many cases already does, include the social web.

The social web is becoming the center of where readers are pointed to news and perhaps more notably where the community shares or creates their own news.

Social sites have become their landing page for news, journalists will have to find ways to integrate their editorial role into the streams, and not just be off to the side on another platform.

  • Online Curation for a “Time-Poor Audience

Journalists will also have social content creation more integrated into their workflow, whether that means creating content for specific platforms, or using the content from that platform for the purposes of curation.

One of the challenges is giving writers and producers tools that they can use to pull disparate elements into stories from Twitter, YouTube and other sources beyond just text from wires. That's why the are people working on Storyful, which uses professional curators to gather social and web content and produce a story out of it.

This is not just about curating real-time content from Twitter and other sources but also the ability to pull in context and even commentary in a way that helps the audience understand what is happening.

  • The Social Network as the New Editor

Though journalists clearly have a role in curating web content and making sense of the noise, slowly a new player is emerging to fulfill the role as a partial news editor.

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