Healthy Conversations

This press man has just realised that all his journalist buddies have moved on from pencil scrawls on notepads to Twitter feeds on iPads. While his buddies all secretly miss the matching suit and hat combo, they have moved on and our guy has been left behind.

Indeed, 70% of journalists now use social networks to assist reporting compared to 41% the year before (no statistic on hats was available at the time of writing however). This sea change, cited in Appature’s tidy little ‘Twitter in Healthcare’ infogram, is not too surprising, but besides journalists using Twitter to keep up to date with the big breaking news stories, what else does social media offer journalists and where is it all heading?

Super-injunctions are a good place to start – they show just how more ‘free’ online information is when compared to professional media organisations. The Times boldly attacked injunctions by printing the story they intended to write with blacked out text where the information regarding the celebrity involved would be.

None of this has stopped online reporting, largely through Twitter and other social media channels, outing those who have paid for their privacy through these expensive court orders. If you want to find out whodunit just have a look online @InjunctionSuper.

This is a very literal example of how the relationship between traditional media and online has reversed. Rather than big media organisations setting the news agenda on which online discourse focuses, they now report largely on a story that breaks online.

Even in the most old fashioned of editorial conferences and newsrooms, there is a growing understanding that these online interactions have changed. And the social networks they are increasingly exploring and experimenting with are keen to help.

The official Twitter Media blog highlights how TV stations are increasingly using Twitter to poll sentiment about a news story while they broadcast, for example by comparing the number of people adding #GoRoyals or #NoRoyals to their tweets. Newspapers are also printing some of their favourite tweets, such as my beloved local South London Press producing a column with the most amusing and thought provoking messages from local people (although they’re not quite as good as some of their headlines…)

This is all well and good but there still seems to be some significant reluctance by some organisations to get on board the social media rollercoaster as the infogram below shows, from Will Sturgeon’s Media Blog. While Sky News and the BBC have policies in place for their journalists to use Twitter on an individual basis, most newspapers are doing little to speak directly with their audiences in this way. So does this mean they are even more likely to be following the agenda set by online outlets and channels?

At the end of the day, it is individual journalists that are taking the lead with online journalism and this is where anyone working in media relations should focus their efforts. Big organisations are not often well equipped to implement major institutional and cultural change – and this includes media organisations’ social media practices. The most immediate thing happening now is that journalists are using Twitter off their own back to get good stories in the paper. So if you want to get a newspaper’s attention about something, getting to know what conversations these guys are having is not a bad place to start.