Facebook's Growing Role in Social Journalism

Facebook's Growing Role in Social Journalism

What is Journalism's place in Social Media?

In this article, the author talks about how social media isn't a tool to be used by journalists, but rather an ocean that they swim in, at least until the next revolution in communication.  He talks about how people rely on certain organizations to get their news from, and how they don't care about who publishes what, and how accurate it is, as long as the ones they rely on have the information when they want it.  This is what he says journalists are for in the social media world.  They bring accurate, reliable, credible information to the social media ocean.
He goes on to say that it is the role of the journalist to keep in mind the public interest, an to serve the public.  This can only be done if journalists learn to go online, and use social media to their advantage, rather than fighting it.
He ends by talking about how social media is being taught to students.  He says that he efforts he's recognized so far have not done enough to properly inform students about all social media has to offer.  He talks about how they need to weave real life experience into the curriculum when dealing with journalism and social media.  He also says that we need to learn from how people learn through social media, in order to keep journalism alive and to adapt it, as to better inform the population.

A Photographer's Journey from Newspapers to Social Media

In this article, Jim MacMillan talks about his career, and how he's gone from a traditional photographer journalist to one that uses social media in his every day life.  MacMillan started as a photographer, working for the Philadelphia daily news for 17 years.  Eventually he became the newsrooms first video journalist.  When asked with the question "what do you do" his answer was complex.
He began making video news reports, but was getting no attention.  The videos were hidden on the website, and needed excellent navigating to find them.  With this happening, he had an idea to go to the Blog world expo in Las vegas.  With the knowledge he learned there he signed up for a number of different social media sites.  After a while, some of the sites became obsolete, while others started to take off.  With this new found form of broadcasting himself, it wasn't long before he was the second most followed person on Twitter in philadelphia.  He was getting as many as 2,000 page views a day, and had a large following.
MacMillan learned a lot from this experience.  In his words, he doesn't think that large traditional media outlets will do very well using social media, because of the independence that it entails.  He also believes that social media should be taught in every journalism class at the college level.  This is because it has become such a huge part of how people get their news these days.