Social media 'an amplification, a megaphone'

Where such websites have led, traditional newspapers have now followed and are encouraging their users to spread and discuss stories, the paper’s author, Nic Newman, controller future media and technology in BBC journalism, said at its launch.

It’s time for traditional news organisations to take note. "The social media revolution is not a fad and it has absolutely revolutionised the media," he said at the BBC's Broadcasting House, London recently.

"The one-way broadcast is over. People want to interact and answer back."

Readers' comments, blogs and tweets are now almost ever-present features on news websites, allowing users to interact with reporters and editors in a way not previously possible.

This transformation is now central to the future of traditional news outlets because it increases the reach of their content, boosts engagement and loyalty levels and potentially tells a better story by increasing reporters' source base, Newman said.

"Social media is like an amplification, like a megaphone," Meg Pickard, head of development of social media at The Guardian, said. She said it was important for journalists to understand the editorial imperative of social media.

Kate Day, communities editor at telegraph.co.uk, explained how the The Daily Telegraph had created an online community at its website with about 25,000 to 30,000 registered users. "Some blog but most use it as a social networking site," she said. 

But what social media is not - or not yet, anyway - is an answer to newspapers' financial woes. Social media increases the number of people using media but does not have an answer to the industry's core challenges - falling advertising revenues and the spread of free content.

"It is still early days in the social media revolution," Newman wrote in the conclusion to his paper. "There is much still much to be learned, but overall there is new confidence in the underlying values of journalism and the role that social media might play in keeping those values relevant in the digital media age."

Not all agree. A response posted to Newman’s paper said the distinction ought to be drawn between taking social media into account as necessary and taking social media too seriously, ever. “Social media is to reality as Reality TV is to TV. Though their existence is scarcely to be denied, neither is their inherently parasitic quality, above which one (seriously) ought to remain at all times able to rise.”

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is based at Oxford University and receives most of its funding from Thomson Reuters Foundation. ■