How has social media changed the way newsrooms work?
Post categories: BBC News channel
Earlier today I gave a talk at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam about how social media has changed the way newsrooms work. The full transcript of the speech is below.
BBC News, like all major news providers, has been transformed by technology and the opportunities it offers over the last 20 or so years. Social media is the latest tectonic plate to move and change the landscape.
It may seem like re-stating the obvious but looking in our rear-view mirror back along the road of technological change shows just how news has changed: typewriters out, computers in; newspaper cuttings libraries closed as the internet opened access to information; mobile phones rather than messages at hotel receptions; satellite technology to feed material rather than tapes put on planes and so on.
Powered by these changes, news has become 24 hours a day; immediate; available on new platforms; mobile. And now the latest powerful tool to change news - social media.
As we'll hear from my colleagues here later, all big news organisations are plunging into the world of social media, looking at its extraordinary newsgathering potential; its potential as a new tool to engage the audience; and as a way of distributing our news.
The BBC, as an early presence on the web, also spotted the possibilities of social media quickly and it has become a highly important and fast-moving part of our multimedia newsroom, as I will outline shortly.
The other area I will also touch on is the range of new challenges and questions that social media poses for the established news providers - like the BBC, CNN, Sky and al-Jazeera.
First, the practical role and influence of social media in the BBC's multimedia newsroom and for BBC News as a whole.
For BBC News, social media currently has three key, highly valuable roles in our journalism:
• newsgathering - it helps us gather more, and sometimes better, material; we can find a wider ranges of voices, ideas and eyewitnesses quickly
• audience engagement - how we listen to and talk to our audiences, and allowing us to speak to different audiences - and
• a platform for our content - it's a way of us getting our journalism out there, in short form or as a tool to take people to our journalism on the website, TV or radio. It allows us to engage different and younger audiences.
The BBC already has a fair track record of inviting the audience to get involved in our journalism - web forums; debates; blogs and comments, and most recently incorporating comment within our website story pages, particularly on the live pages.
We are proud of the standards we have set in processing, sifting and verifying material sent to us and sourced through social newsgathering, giving us a new dimension when telling some of the major stories of recent times - the Japan tsunami; the Arab Spring; the Burma uprisings; the Norway shootings; the riots in England.
The team we have allows us to fully engage in using this material, and reinforce the BBC values that our audience expects, in particular accuracy. So we managed to avoid, for example, use of the photo-shopped Bin Laden body photo after his killing.
Many of our leading journalists and presenters now incorporate social media platforms into their work: Tim Willcox; Lyse Doucet; Robert Peston and until recently Laura Kuenssberg (who has now been joined by her Twitter followers, with our blessing, at ITV News).
We've innovated, experimenting with branded hashtags to curate coverage; visualising Royal Wedding day tweets on our website; and work is under way to seamlessly integrate field despatches from our correspondents and reporters into our core news services and social media output.
And like many established news providers, we have created an open and modern set of guidance to help our staff engage, gather news and spread their journalism, working within the BBC's editorial values that are at the core of our journalism.
Here's a short video we've just made to illustrate briefly the role of social media right now in the BBC Newsroom.
However, now I'd like to add just a little context to the growth of social media for the audiences of BBC News.
Since its launch Twitter has obviously seen rapid growth.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario