The Oriella PR Network’s Digital Journalism Study surveyed nearly 500 journalists across 12 countries in 2011 and found social platforms doing one job well and another badly. Nearly half of respondents, 47%, used Twitter to source new story angles, against 35% for Facebook — but conventional public relations still dominated, with 62% taking story ideas from PR agencies and 59% from corporate spokespeople.
The gap widened sharply once a story was underway. Only a third used Twitter to verify, and a quarter Facebook, while 61% turned to PR agencies and 57% to corporate spokespeople for the same purpose. The report’s conclusion was that social media were playing an increasingly vital role in news-gathering, but that when a journalist needed to check a fact, brands and their agencies remained the first ports of call.
One reading of that reluctance is unease about the authenticity of a tweet — which, as Paul Bradshaw had argued, overlooks the fact that the platform is not faceless: “every piece of information, and every person, leaves a trail of data that you can use to build a picture of its reliability.” Bradshaw also supplied the historical parallel. Journalists were once sceptical of the telephone, worrying about how to establish that the person on the other end was who they claimed to be. New communication technologies arrive in the newsroom through a contested negotiation, and the usual outcome is that journalists carry their existing working methods onto the new platform rather than reconsider what reporting might become in an open and highly connected space.