Social Media in The Newsroom II: Little Tweets Versus Giant Tablets

Revolution in the streets and in the media

On December 2010, a fruit vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the Tunisian police confiscated his wares and publicly humiliated him.  This act was a catalyst of the Tunisian Revolution that finished with the 23 year dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the “Arab Spring” that revolted in North of Africa and the Middle East.[1]

The concepts of “Revolution,” “Twitter,” “Facebook,” and social media in general, started to be printed together after the events that affected that part of the world in 2010-2011. The social agitation was combined with online demonstrations on Twitter, protest videos on Youtube and news shared on Twitter.  If Justin Bieber has his blind followers called “Beliebers,” social sedia has its “social-media-liebers,”. These new Internet specimen shows its support to causes using hashtags, twitting and retwitting.

For the non “social-media-liebers,” Facebook and Twitter works as an acoustic box, a loudspeaker for a phenomena that would occur without these technologies, as a consequence of years of social discontent and repression. Nevertheless, the world could follow without any censorship the events captured by smartphones and other devices, avoiding any government communicational wall.

The power of the social media, in these terms, plays a protagonist role against the official discourse provided by the official media that, in countries like Tunisia, avoided revealing any of the social movements taking place in the streets of the country. The figure of the activist blogger/twitter/citizen-reporter grew and the world began to take notice of this area of media documentation and this new form of journalism[2].

However,  a couple of years after the initial excitement about the power of the social network, some analysts, like Sean Aday from George Washington University, have claimed that there were more people tweeting in the Occident about the events in Bahrein, Libia or El Cairo, than in the cities themselves. In these terms the big attribute of platforms like Twitter is their capacity to work as a ubiquitous source of information for traditional media and to offer an excellent way of establishing ongoing  feedback with the public[3].

These new terms of use generated by online platforms complicated the old concept of source reliability, and the authenticity of the material that you can see on a Youtube video or in a picture sent using Instagram or Twitter was called into question.  As Jason DeMers –CEO and founder of Audience Bloom- writes, “this new style of ‘citizen journalism’ can be a double edged sword at times and one of the clearest recent examples of this occurred on the site Reddit, as the search for the Boston Bombing was taking place.”[4]

What happened during those days in April 2013 is that unchecked facts published on Reddit  generated a search for the wrong man, who was eventually found dead from an apparent suicide. There are many arguments about whether or not  it was Reddit’s fault , but what happened in this case is unavoidable. When new forms of instant digital media are confronted with the dilemma of checking their sources and trying to provide minute by minute information, the importance of the 24 hour delay and fact checkingof the old newspaper is revealed. However, journalistic errors and reporting mistakes are enough to fill a whole book, and as these new forms of journalism influenced by social media platforms are so recent, one would expect that a form of fact checking to ensure greater accuracy will come about in time.

Too much information?

One good point of view on the subject of reliability is provided by the journalist Andy Carvin in his book “Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution”. In the publication, the National Public Radio reporter explains how, during the days of the “Arab Spring” he cultivated social media sources to be used in “a new form of journalism where civilians on the ground controlled the news.”[5]

The work of Carving consisted of creating a strong relationship between the citizen and the reporter , where the NPR journalist, based in New York, “curated” the information  as a working filter between what was  tweeted, and what was actually published.

“Rather than having news staff fulfilling the roles of producers, editors, researchers, etc., I have my Twitter followers playing all of those roles. So it ends up becoming this rather large, convoluted media literacy experiment in many ways,” explains the journalist on the NPR website.

This is at the heart of the dilemma: a newsroom cannot work only with journalists attached to the computer, checking social networks and searching for news. News organizations are investing in employees who are more comfortable using social media and technologies related with it, but in the end nothing can be compared totraditional methods of journalism, where the news is created where it is actually happening and not in cyberspace.

A good point about this last idea is that, even though Andy Carvin created excellent work reporting on what happened in  North of Africa and the Middle East from his desk in New York, the National Public Radio’s network correspondent, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro received the prestigious Peabody journalism award in 2012. As we can see on the website Journalis.co.uk, she was praised for her “exemplary coverage throughout the Middle East,” “eloquently describing events or passing her microphone to everyday protesters or regime supporters.” This type of journalistic work would be impossible without being in the field

 Recently, Fox News gave us a great example about what not to do when a news provider wants to introduce social media into the newsroom.

To connect with “the new generation” and the users of smartphones, Twitter and social networking, the news anchor Shepard Smith showed, during the first days of October, the outrageously innovative Fox “News Deck”.

Walking in a Star Trek/Minority Report look-a-like studio, Smith revealed a room equipped with 55-inch touch screen computers operated not by journalists, but by “information specialists”. These specialists spend their day looking for stories in these screens called Big Area Touchscreens (BATs), instead of the traditional approach of classical journalist reporting.[6]

Also, there is a 38 foot long screen where some tweets from the public and reporters are displayed. And the last gadget is a remote control –very similar to the Wii control- that the  news host  uses  to shuffle  through a pictures carrousel.

“Just like you, we get our news across multiple platforms”, said the news host in a video profiling the expensive Fox News acquisition.  Actually, what Shepard Smith is saying is very important, because when FOX News reshapes its way of working, influenced by social media networking, it means that this phenomena has entered into the mainstream.

Of course, the reaction of the rest of the world to the Fox News innovation was not the best. For example, Jon Stewart -a declared “not friend” of the conservative TV station- accurately observed in “The Daily Show”, that the size of the TVs at home will be the same, no matter the 55 inch “BATs” or the 38 foot twitter wall. He also made an editorial/ethical observation, about Shepard Smith’s style , who used the Wii looking device, jumping from a picture of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, to an American Football play comment.  Additionally, anonymous Internet users reacted creating several animated gifs, making fun of the recently launched newsroom.

I chose the Fox News example, because even though Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the media is the message”, there is an important human factor that gives a shape to this message. As I expressed earlier, journalistic work on location is still the most valuable. The problem is that only the big news corporations can afford this expensive human work, and these big corporations are very permeable to political or economic interests.  Fox News is a prototypical example of this relationship between media and power, and it seems that their choice, as an article from “The Verge” magazine says, was: “If you can’t make the news better, make them bigger”.

We are living in an exciting moment of transition in journalism. The main problem of blindly trusting in social networking to report is the same that with the classical sources: reliability. Also, is important to remember that the social events are happening in the world and not in the screen. The coexistence of broadcasting media and social media is a new issue for journalism and, while we still have more questions than answers about it, the instructions seems to be the same: check the facts, and keep editorial balance.