It is obvious within todays society, media technology is merging and evolving to create new-media packaged products! Traditional industrial models used in distributing, collecting and creating data to publish have also evolved with the technological advancement. If the ways that news industries present their news has adapted, has the way that journalists “do their job” changed too!
- http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/
An issue constantly pressed towards media studies students is the issue that newspapers are constantly dumbing down and focus on human interest stories, so what interests ‘HUMANS’! If you a newspaper editor for ‘The Sun’ (u.k) its apparently X-factor or some other truly shocking event in the socio-reality calender we call television schedules.
However being realistic, a way that journalists can generate human interest stories is by actually contacting these apparent humans…. and in todays society that involves social networking sites.
For arguments sake we will talk about ‘Twitter’ and how this social network can generate NEWs!
Since the arrival of twitter on the social networking scene in 2001, People from all over the world use this networking tool to communicate with friends, groups and professionals in which they can share ideas and conversations. This is very useful for the budding journalist in search for the stories fast, they can now go direct to the source…the people.
Considering the many facilities available to twitter users; the most useful in relation towards journalism and creating contacts with institutions and professionals….. ‘TWEETMINISTER’ is the communication channel where politics enters the digital revolution.
‘Tweetminister’ is a live feed of politically connected people which offer traditionally exclude members of society (like everbody who aint a professional) an invitation to political culture through social networking, the site offers messages from MPs, Parties and officials with a means to get in direct contact with them ( if uve been vetted amongst other things), you can also directly specialize what your in search off…. Using tweetminister you can follow MP’s in certain geographical areas and using twitter search engines you can also direct a search on a particular topic.
For example i will demonstrate how social networking can be used by search for the topic B.N.P in twitter search;
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=B.N.P
This search directed me towards additional sources to continue my research
This is one off many ways journalists can collect and direct data in constructing a story, if you have any other suggestions towards how journalists are using social networking websites to generate stories please comment. thanks
