Both organisations have told their journalists not to break news on Twitter first.

In a post on the BBC’s Editors blog, social media editor Chris Hamilton acknowledged the value of Twitter but concluded:

We’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.

Instead he points out that BBC journalists are able to inform the newsroom and tweet simultaneously:

We’re fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts.

On his Twitter stream, Chris sought to clarify the guidance to BBC News journalists:

It’s about the best way of breaking news on all our platforms – social networks, our own website, TV, radio.

— Chris Hamilton (@chrishams) February 8, 2012

Essential point is we have system that allows journalists to file and tweet at the same time.

— Chris Hamilton (@chrishams) February 8, 2012

The tensions over Twitter and breaking news result from the collision of two worlds – when a hierarchical media system in the hands of the few collides with a networked media system open to all.

The reasons for wanting to control the flow of news are understandable. Historically, news organisations have been the gate-keepers, deciding what is news, how to report it and when and how to distribute it.

In a nuanced post, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones acknowledges that “We are all feeling our way forward through the fog of this new media landscape.” He concludes:

Some would like to turn the clock back to a simpler time, when all power resided in the newsdesk, only star reporters got a byline, and sharing information with outsiders before the presses rolled or the bulletin began was a sacking offence.

But it is almost certainly too late for that.

The guidance for journalists not to break news on Twitter is based on a flawed understanding of today’s media ecosystem. It assumes that journalists still have a monopoly on breaking the news.

Repeatedly, the first news of a natural disaster or other major news story have emerged first on Twitter.  Nicola Bruno wrote an excellent paper (PDF) for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism on the emergence of Twitter as a breaking news network.

Understandably, a journalist tweeting a breaking news event is likely to have greater impact. This is what happened when the New York Times’ Brian Stelter retweeted a message from Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on the death of Bin Laden.

So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.

— Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) May 2, 2011

But to advise journalists not to break news on Twitter is anachronistic. It ignores the value that a journalist and their parent organisation can gain by signalling that they are across a major development.

People who’ve heard that something has happened may wonder why a journalist with BBC or Sky News hasn’t tweeted it yet.

Moreover, tweeting the news can add to their credibility as a trusted news source, especially if Twitter is awash with rumour and speculation.  A message from a journalist at the BBC or Sky News is likely to be considered as a trusted source, potentially drive audiences to the website or broadcast outlets.

This is a valuable service to their audiences, even those not on Twitter. The value of Twitter is as a distributed network,where the reach of a message can grow exponentially with every retweet.

Arguably, there is an imperative for journalists to break news on Twitter to fulfil the role as a trusted and reliable source of accurate information.

(Disclosure: I worked for the BBC for 16 years and have worked with both Chris and Rory).

This post was updated to include Chris Hamilton’s comments on the BBC technology for filing text.

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But the top five are older posts from 2007, 2008 and 2009 that continue to resonate with readers.

Principles of journalism as a word cloud

What a word cloud says about this blog

How to find out anything about anyone online

The new roles for journalists in a multimedia world

Create a breaking news site in minutes with WordPress

Studies find journalists use Twitter for broadcast

How journalists are using Twitter

Social networking sites challenge journalism ethics

Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account?

Social media transforming how people get the news

Thanks to all who take the time to read the blog and I wish you all the best for 2012.

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For my contribution, I suggested that the excitement and hype over social media may start dying down in the coming year, and this is something to be welcomed.

My argument draws from Roy Amara’s First Law of Technology:

With every change in technology that affects consumer behaviour, We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

In my post, I suggest:

Technologies reach their full potential when we forgot about the novelty. Instead they become boring and blend into the background. How often do we think about the technology behind the telephone, or the television set in our living room?

With any luck, this is what will happen with social media. Social media tools and services will be so ingrained within our everyday experiences that we forget that they are such recent developments.

Essentially, the technology will become invisible as we shape it to meet our political, social, and cultural needs.

Read the full post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

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The study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news outlets in the US by the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism is in line with earlier academic studies.

The Pew study, in collaboration with the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, found that Twitter was mainly used to distribute news and boost traffic to a news outlet’s website.

Just over 90 per cent of the tweets analysed during a week provided a link to a news story on the organisation’s own website.

Twitter was used far less as a reporting tool or as a way to filter information. Just two per cent of tweets asked for information or for eye-witness accounts. A minute one per cent of tweets were retweets from outside a news outlet.

There was a slight variation when it came to the Twitter feeds of individual journalists, rather than institutional accounts.

A study of the accounts of 13 individual journalists found that three per cent of tweets asked for information and six per cent were retweets of material not sourced from their news outlet.

Pew concludes:

“These findings reveal limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.

This behavior resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service – of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else – carries more weight.”

Admittedly, Pew only studied a small sample. But other research has also highlighted how news outlets have tended to use social media to try to reach a broader audience, rather than engaging in an exchange with the audience.

A study by Marcus Messner, Maureen Linke, and Asriel Eford (PDF) found that the official Twitter accounts of the top newspaper and TV outlets in the US functioned largely as an automated RSS feed of the latest news stories.

Another study found that many newsrooms automatically generated a tweet  (PDF) with a link when a story was published on the website.

The use of Twitter and other social networking tools to go beyond broadcast is still the exception in newsrooms. Yet there is potential for so much more.

In a chapter on Twitter for the new second edition of The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, I explore how newsrooms are adopting and adapting to social media, concluding:

Twitter is affecting how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. New journalistic genres are emerging as news outlets incorporate social media services into daily routines. A process of negotiation is taking place, as traditional ways of working bump up against social, cultural and technological practices that disrupt established journalistic norms.

The Pew study analysed one week of tweets on the main Twitter feed of 13 different news organisations, amounting to more than 3,600 tweets.

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The title of the talk was Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer.

Abstract: Social media is becoming ever more ingrained in the experience of news consumers. Social networking sites are evolving from being more than spaces for personal exchanges, becoming one of the mediums for sharing and recommending the news as users appropriate computer-mediated technologies for their own purposes. While the dissemination of news through social interaction has always played a role in the diffusion of media, sharing is becoming central to the way many experience the news. Research into how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows suggests people are using social media to complement, rather than replace, more traditional media sources.

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The three presentations were by Zizi Papacharissi of University of Illinois at Chicago, Adrienne Russell of the University of Denver and myself. The session was moderated by Kalyani Chadha of the University of Maryland.

The research presented:

• Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer; by Alfred Hermida.
• The rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter: Affective news streams, hybridity, and networked publics; by Zizi Papacharissi.
• A Networked Approach to Emergent News Media Landscapes, by Adrienne Russell.



Video streaming by Ustream

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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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Pew found that just over a quarter (27%) of adults say they regularly or sometimes get news or news headlines through Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites. This rises to 38% for younger adults.

These figures applies to all the 1,501 people surveyed. Digging deeper into the stats, only 44% said they were regular users of social networking sites.

As a result, the sample size of social media users is 660 people.  It stands to reason that the people who said they get news on social networks would just be drawn from the 660 social media users.

In this case, the percentage of social media users who get their news through Facebook or Twitter rises to 61%.

By comparison, a 2010 survey of Canadian news habits I was involved with found that 42% of social media users say they get some of their news on a daily basis from sites like Facebook.

In the study, we found that the more people used social media, the more likely they were to turn to it as a source of news.

Our Canadian study didn’t look at where people were getting their news from on social media.

But Pew found that the majority of people (72%) said they mostly get the same news and information on social media that they would get elsewhere.

The most common reason for turning to social media for news was convenience, cited by 20%. By comparison, 18% cited variety and 12% quality.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concludes that “social networking has expanded the ways in which the public gets news and information.”

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Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves.

She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist these days is futile. Instead she paraphrased Warhol saying in the future everyone will be a journalist for 15 minutes.

Looking ahead, she said journalism has many futures - as a business, as a profession, as a process – and we are only at the start.

She recapped how some of the previous arguments about journalism tended to frame the future negatively, such as a future dominated by the “hamster wheel” of live coverage and technologists.

Bell argued we tended to see disruption and technology as a bad thing. But in her view, these factors favour good journalism.

“It feels like journalism has been in defence mode for a long time and is now breaking out of its boundaries,” she said, suggesting journalism can learn from other disciplines.

For her, the future of journalism is about understanding technologies and the platforms that support it.

Talking about her journalism students who use technology in their reporting, Bell argued that how to tell stories best is no longer in the hands of technologists, but in the hands of journalists.

She suggested that one emerging core skill is how to make the best of collaboration between journalists, technologists and beyond.

Another idea she contested is that instant journalism is bad journalism. Instead she said the social, real-time web and proliferation of mobile devices had been one of the galvanising elements in journalism.

“Live journalism isn’t hamster journalism,” she insisted.

The live stream of journalism, the use of free tools and the involvement of people who are not journalists per se, is making journalism better, she argued.

Her most controversial point was about the funding of journalism. In her view, revenues and profits did not equate with good journalism.

Now, she said, the primary focus of those involved in journalism is sustainability.

She quoted the example of the Journal Register company with its focus on experimenting with digital, open approaches to journalism. But, she continued, there is uncertainty about whether the experimentation will work.

She also cited ProPublica as an example of what can be done when we go beyond the way we have traditionally thought of journalism.

“There is no clear answer to what a news organisation will look like in five year’s time,” said Bell. “The future of journalism is there to be defined, we have all the right conditions.”

She concluded by insisting that we have a collective capacity to make this all work, but this can only be done by looking outwards and looking at other disciplines.

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For those who can’t make it, here is the abstract from the paper and the slides from my presentation.

This paper examines how social media is influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status. However social media questions the individualistic, top- down ideology of traditional journalism. The paper considers journalism practices as a set of literacies, drawing on the theoretical framework of new literacies to examine the shift from a focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked. It explores how news organizations are negotiating the tensions inherent in a transition to a digital, networked media environment, considering how journalism is evolving into a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time.

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