Social Media and Journalism

Mashable, today, put forth quite a lengthy article on the future of Social media in Journalism.  I felt this was appropriate to review for obvious reasons, however, particularly as it focused on Social media, not just online in general.

I really enjoyed this article as I felt that it put forward some thoughts that are not always considered.  The author puts forward the notion that Journalists need to give up the idea of being the only authority when reporting news - not a new idea - but they do make an interesting point when they say that "enlisting a community of intelligent contributors" can help journalists provide daily community coverage.  I think there is an emphasis on "intelligent contributors" here - there are so many people playing in the social media space and information is not always valuable, relevant or credible.  Sorting this, curating this, will be come a main task of journalists.

What I do really like about this article is the conversational tone that is set right from the start.  Within the first section, the author asks the reader "... we would love to hear your thoughts and observations in the comments below" and this sentiment is echoed at the end of the article.  I feel that this really reflects the nature and topic of this article brilliantly.  It focuses on social media, collaborative reporting and conversations, and by asking readers to take part in a conversation is paralleling the focus of the article itself.

As far a the layout of this story goes, there were 2 main elements that concerned me.  Firstly was the number of hyperlinks within the article.  This is the standard way of referencing online, however the fact that there were 5 hyperlinks within the first paragraph and a half, was quite distracting.  Readers are spending less and less time deep reading as it is and adding this many links is likely to send your reader away from your article.  Additionally, whilst the story was organised in to easily discernable headings, the screengrabs that were used weren't clearly referenced.  The images spanned the entire width of the blog with little reference, thus it was difficult to actually identify whether the image was actually part of the story or was perhaps an ad.

Otherwise I felt it was a very well-written article that covered many angles of the story in depth.