Mobile apps, Facebook and other types of social media tools are being able to cater to a far wider audience than print media could in terms of News
First Thought discussion at the 35th annual Galway Arts Festival that wanted to look at where the journalism was taking its course in today’s age of digital revolution, the first thought that came up for discussion was – How will the readers access this article; whether through printed pages or via Facebook, Twitter and Google+
The name for the discussion Life in the Old Dog Yet was taken from the editorial printed in The Irish Times earlier in the year as a reaction to declaration made by the Morning Ireland asserting that print media is a dying industry as explained by Dave O’Connell group editor of the Connacht Tribune and one of the panel chair.
The first question to the panel was: “Are newspapers going the way of the dodo?” Ranelagh native and Dublin City University-educated Observer editor John Mulholland stated that everyone knows that the newspaper circulation is receding across the globe.
He further talked how the people in the industry need to make a distinction between news in print media and journalism of today. A lot of news and journalism doesn’t even feature in print of the Guardian/Observer, it goes live via blogs or audios or videos or interactive and data journalism.
Maggie O’Kane established journalist and documentary maker who is currently editorial director of Guardian Films further went on to say that the main point is the content being delivered and it really is of no consequence what means of delivery is being utilized.
Mulholland added that while the economic model for newspapers is incredibly challenged, the model for news journalism isn’t broken because the news is now reaching far more people via Facebook, mobile apps and other tools of social media.
Mark Little, chief executive of social news agency Storyful at the same time explained how they exercise various technologies to identify, verify and monetise what is known as User Generated Content or UGC from social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter.
According to Little the journalism and newspaper industry might require a shift in its perspective and may require to redefine the role of journalism because in the past the journalists have acted as the diggers and hacks who provided information to passive audiences but in present day they are administrators of a plethora of information. Almost a hundred hours of YouTube video is produced every single minute.
Dr Bahareh Heravi, project lead at the Digital Humanities and Journalism (HuJo) working group inside the SFI Research Centre INSIGHT@NUIGalway which has recently done the first ever national survey to investigate and find out how Irish journalists are using social media as part of their job. She stated that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter have entirely transformed the concept of breaking news because today anyone using a mobile phone can capture a story which is unfolding and report it directly to the world. There is no time lag in covering the story and it reaching the media office and being printed.
Studies have been carried out in the UK, Europe and across the globe. A 2011 report from research group Cision established that 97 per cent of UK journalists are utilizing social media tools frequently for their work.
The Cision survey established that journalists who are employing social media tools consider that they are more engaged with their audience even though most used them as alternate publishing platform rather than a way to resource or validate news.
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