The impact social media has on journalism, and journalists, has been put under the spotlight with the launch of a study by Nic Newman.
The BBC journalist looked at five different mainstream news organisations and concluded that social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook together with a rise in citizen journalism had formed a ‘Fifth Estate’.
Borrowing the phrase from the work of academic William Dutton, he said this Fifth Estate would not replace mainstream media but instead was complementary to it.
“Each party is beginning to understand its place in a complex new eco-system of news and information. The mainstream media monitors a wide range of sources, including the Fifth Estate. “But as the timeline of stories is compressed, it can be argued that there is an even greater need for traditional journalistic skills of sorting fact from fiction; selecting key facts for a mass audience.”
During last night’s debate hosted by the BBC, Newman introduced his study to a panel which included Meg Pickard of The Guardian and Kate Day of The Telegraph in front of an invited audience of journalists, broadcasters and academics.
He said there were three main points he wanted to make; 1. The revolution is real and relevant to journalism; 2. It was worth noting that mainstream news organisations were busy waking up to social media and 3. They no longer had to apologise, they could operate in these areas on their own terms.
His research focussed on the activities of the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, New York Times and CNN as well as individual journalists. The BBC’s Robert Peston was quoted as being “hugely enthusiastic” about his blog which he believes has been instrumental in helping to explain a complex story while The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss explains her vast Twitter following as being the result of a level of personal interaction.
But Newman concludes his chapter on changing journalistic practice by noting that actually, little has changed. “But so far at least, the use of new tools has not led to any re-write of the rule book – just a few tweeks around the edges. “As with so many aspects of the internet, social media are providing a useful extra layer of functionality, enabling stories to be told in new ways, not changing the heart of what journalists do. ‘Same values, new tools’, sums up the core thinking in most newsrooms”.
* The rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism by Nic Newman is a working paper produced in conjunction with the University of Oxford and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Dim Sum Digital 
I’m inclined to agree with Newman’s summary. I’m not sure much has changed yet at the nationals in terms of how journalists generally are using such tools. Twitter gets a huge amount of coverage in the Guardian and on the tech pages of some other papers like the Telegraph, but when you look at the reader comments below such articles, they are largely made up of readers complaining about the endless coverage of Twitter! I’m a heavy user of Twitter myself and I agree with such comments. Some journalists are making good use of Twitter to help break stories or expand on them (for example, Guardian Tech’s editor, Charles Arthur, who exploited Twitter to crowdsource help unravelling the MPs expenses data after the Telegraph first broke the story by more conventional means.
Journalists need to stop banging on in print about how great Twitter is (which it is!) and actually start using it to engage followers and collaborate to source and break stories.
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