The Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland kicks off with a panel on social media, with an introduction by Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow, @adamostrow.
Jim Long, @newmediajiim, from NBC News, starts by pointing out how social media has shifted power from a few people at the top to everybody.
Liz Heron, @lheron, social media editor for The New York Times, picks up on the theme. In her view, social media has been a hugely democratising force, with so much of the news played out over social media.
But she also points out that journalists have a role in identifying the news from the noise.
Lynn Sweet, @lizsweet, Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, explains how social media has affected coverage of the White House. She checks Twitter feeds constantly, and Flickr, where the White House will often post photos.
She gives the example of how social media helped out figure out what Michelle Obama was doing. The White House now sends news out first on Twitter.
There is no substitute for entry-level, shoe leather reporting, says Sweet.
The discussion moves onto verification, a common theme in debates on social media. Heron says journalists need to use new skills by identifying signals that help to check information.
NBC is hiring a social media editor, says Long, who is going to have an overview of what is coming in and how NBC news is using social media.
At the Times, Heron says she trains journalists on how to use social media, as well as thinking strategically about the main accounts and what the news organisation should be doing on social media.
“My job will probably won’t exist in five years,” says Heron, because every journalist will be on social media. But she hopes there will still be a centralised team that will be thinking strategically about understanding and developing strategies.
Heron says you need to be a journalist to be a social media editor, not a marketing consultant. She talks about how the NYTimes is asking readers to send in questions during the GOP debates on social media so that its journalists can fact check and add context.
Heron also explains how the Times team will come up with a hashtag to pull together a conversation and crystallise the exchange on Twitter, pulling some of the tweets into the live blogs.
The discussion moves onto whether you should break news on Twitter. Sweet says that if it is a scoop that she has developed, she will work with her editors to figure out how to break the news.
Heron notes that what happens if you see a scoop on Twitter that others have not noticed, such as the tweet about the death of Bin Laden.
Sweet says she would not retweet it, while Heron says she would, saying in the tweet “we’re hearing…”
Long also says that he would hold a scoop and instead maybe tweet that NBC has a big story coming.
Heron points out that you can add value without being first.
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