The 2013 State of the News Media report, the annual survey from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, called social media an indispensable tool — “for distributing content and attracting new readers, as well as for building deeper engagement with current ones”. By the time of publication 184 news organisations had a designated social media editor.
Mobile was part of the reason. Just under half of smartphone users and around 40% of tablet users were getting some of their news through a social network. In absolute traffic the share stayed modest, averaging 9%, but the spread between publications was wide: the Huffington Post led on engagement with more than 2,500 stories carrying at least 100 Facebook interactions, close to double the figure for its nearest rival, the Daily Mail. The report also identified social media as a second screen for television, with CNN drawing the most mentions ahead of Fox News, MSNBC and NBC.
Not everything worked. Facebook social readers had stumbled, though Pew suggested newer features could still raise the platform’s importance for news organisations. The sharper warning was that concentrating on Facebook and Twitter alone “may no longer be enough”, with newsrooms already using Pinterest and Instagram for visual material from police wanted notices to campaign photographs. That led to the question the report left open for editors working through cutbacks: how much time to give social media, and where to concentrate what resources remain.