Ian Reeves

PHASES OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION – THE ‘FIFTH ESTATE’ Message boards and community

forums (1995 onwards) Blogging (2001 onwards) Social media and social networks

(2006 onwards)

Difficult term to pin down precisely, but incorporates:some bloggingsocial networkingMicrobloggingRecommendation sitesUser content sharing

Participation Collective Transparency Independence

Telling better stories – there is always someone who knows more than you doMaking better relationships – engaged users are more loyal, and more attractive to advertisers. They may even payAttracting new usersBreaking news leads and tip-offs

Message boardsComments on storiesNews UGCNon-news UGCCommissioned BlogsReader blogsUser-generated dataUser questionsMember spacesMember recommendationsOff-site engagementMicroblogs

In 2008, Facebook had fewer users than CNN.comNow it dwarfs it by more than 25xSocial networks easily outperform news sites in terms of engagement – see Alexa.com to make comparisons20 per cent of all internet time is spent on themAverage daily time on Facebook is 30 mins – 25 minutes more than most news sitesTelegraph gets 10 percent of traffic from social media sitesIn February 2011 Twitter delivered 26% of all clickthroughs to UK news web sites

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS TO JOURNALISM Finding people – essentially crowdsourcing the

pubic for information on the whereabouts of witnesses or other key figures in a story;

People who self-publish – activists (holding regimes to account), bloggers or anyone in need of a voice who would otherwise not be given a voice;

Big events – the London riots was an excellent example of how journalists could harness the power of Twitter to follow leads and chase down stories. The ensuing chaos was too big and too fast-moving for journalists to manage on their own;

The butterfly effect – a small action creating a ripple effect. It has to be a tweet containing very valuable information, which can be hard with 140 characters. One example would be the tweet that broke the Ryan Giggs super-injunction.

Iranian street protests of 2009

Huge amount of noise and false information – eg reports of 3m protestors (when only a few hundred thousand); Mousavi ‘house arrest’; president of monitoring committee ‘declared election invalid.’Little balance – conversation overwhelmingly in favour of MousaviSelf-selecting group, largely from liberal elite

Extended newsgathering possibilities – pictures and story leadsAccumulation of ‘kudos’ within social media communities, plus traffic gains from linksRelative simplicity of monitoring multiple news sources

SOCIAL MEDIA STORIES

G20 protests – amateur video of Ian Tomlinson being pushed by policeman

Mumbai terrorist attacks – people tweeting from hotel rooms as gunmen rampaged

Norwegian shootings by Anders Breivik Trafigura, Ryan Giggs super-injunctions London riots

Usage of social media sites is highly uneven – beware thinking it is representativeThe 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality holds

IMPORTANT CAVEATS

Importance of Twitter can be overstated. It has 100million active users out of global population of 7bn.

“People very often don’t want a conversation. People’s interest in media is very often as background. The earliest investigations into media going back the foundation of Gallup indicate that people are not as absorbed in media as the creators of media. “ – Adrian Monck.

Dan Gillmor – We, the media (full copies in library)Antony Bradley – A New Definition of Social MediaRusbridger video on Future of JournalismClay Shirky – How social media can make historyBBC social media guidelinesTwitter and journalismJournalism and Social Media: 15 Examples Worth Learning From