Working for our social media blog was indeed a great fun as well as a valuable experience. From the very beginning the process from research to presentation all aspects of social media blog was very interesting. It was a great example of mutual coordination and cooperation among the group members. It also provided us with an opportunity to share our views and experiences not only among the group members but the response and comments received on our posts. The real feedback on our blog from our friends, colleagues and fellow students is indeed a great learning on our part. Collective presentation of our research was also really of great worth. Overall it was a wonderful experience which should help us in our professional journalistic life.
BBC’s Panorama was on Egypt lastnight. There was an interesting scene where Jane Corbin was interviewing a couple of middle class Egyptian women who spoke of how Facebook saved their country.
If you click on the link below, it will take you to the BBC Panorama webpage. Though it is interesing, if you don’t want to watch it all, just move the timeline cursor to about 19.30 and watch from this time.
By means of research for this blog, it is safe to say that social media is increasingly being adopted throughout the media industry and will continue to do so.
When watching the news, the presenters now ask us to tweet our thoughts and opinions to their twitter accounts; when listening to the radio, we are invited to do the same and write comments on their facebook page ; newspapers now have their own social media correspondents like the Guardian’s ‘Networker,’ or in the ‘I’ newspaper, they have a section dedicated to readers tweets and a ‘blogosphere,’ where they have taken sections from some of their readers’ blogs. Furthermore, charities are using social media to spread their news fast and efficiently and to connect with the public and the interested community. Social media even makes news. The most recent news in the UK is that Twitter can be used by journalists in the courts.
Who knows about the future of social media? It is developing fast in the world of news and is constantly being used in different and new ways. Maybe, soon, these programmes will be in 3D, or we will start seeing holograms of people commenting live on TV news programmes through a new social media application… watch this space.
I am looking into the different media outlets that adopt social media and the ways that they do it. My last post briefly introduced how the Sports industry uses sites like Facebook and Twitter as important elements to spread news fast not only to those within it but to the fans and public too.
This post shall look at how more and more now charities are adopting social media to spread their news to the public, their sponsors and those who make donations. There seems to be a new industry now opening up for fellow journalists within the charity sector. As well as PR jobs, there are job titles available now like ‘Head of News,’ which I saw advertised recently on the Cancer Macmillian website.
Shelterbox is a charity based in Cornwall. It provides disaster relief to countries where naturals disasters have happened, like extreme floods or earthquakes. Tommy Tonkins is the Communications Officer there and he talks about the huge impact that social media has made on the charity in terms of spreading the news and connecting more people to the organisation:
“Social media has enabled ShelterBox to engage and interact with our supporters in a way charities have traditionally struggled with. By fostering and developing a wider conversation with our ‘audience’ through different social media channels, we’ve been able to raise global awareness of our mission. Our use of social media has empowered our supporters and engendered a sense of community on a global scale.”
“In terms of spreading news, nothing can rival the immediacy of social media. Our Response Teams tweet live from disaster zones as the situation unfolds around them providing a real-time snap shot of what life is like on the ground. Social media has revolutionised the way we communicate and the way we consume information.”
In the traditional world the news organizations had to give out information, and people would consume it. But simply making information available is not enough for today’s public. Today’s audiences expect to be able to choose what they read, and most believe they should be able to contribute content and opinions, too. This shift is generally called the social media.
Basically social media use internet-and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. It has not only benefited journalists but has also helped give individuals a way to speak up to the world.
More and more people prefer reading newspapers online due to the online version being global, free and around forever. If most of the consumers are on line, it is better to reach them online. Traditional media is slowly becoming history. Journalists are now making a good use of social media to engage their audience.
From this point, in order to analyse this blog’s topic of the impact that social media has in journalism nowadays, each one of us has our own section to research.
Iqbal Hussein will be looking into the various forms of social media. I will be invesitgating into the different media outlets that use social media and it’s outputs. How journalism has adopted social media over the last decade is Laura Isherwood‘s area and Ruben Martinez will be exploring the legal and ethical concerns surrounding it.
As we all research into out own topic, we will add posts as we go, be it our own thoughts on it, a summary of what we have found, a conclusion or a useful link.
Finally, as we all complete our individual studies, we should all be able to draw conclusions on our main topic of the impact of social media and draw a general map of different types of news gathering techniques and outputs whilst taking into consideration the legal parameters.
Posted by Rubén Martínez 
iqbalyousafzai786
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Rubén Martínez
Rebecca Novell
UCF Social Media 
