Do journalists use Twitter to find their stories? (Meet the Media event, July 15th)

This is a quick recap of a breakfast event I attended organised by PRNewswire with CorpComms magazine.

The event was held at the Adam Street Club just off the Strand.

The discussion panel was pretty strong with the topic being ‘Do journalists use Twitter to find their stories?’

• Paul Murphy, editor-in-chief of FT Tilt, and founder of FT Alphaville
• Mark Leftly, deputy business editor, Independent on Sunday
• Giles Fraser, co-founder, Brands2Life
• Steve Dineen, columnist, City A.M.
• Andrew Bowman, senior key account manager, PR Newswire
• Moderated by Helen Dunne, editor, CorpComms Magazine

The debate started with Giles Fraser introducing a report ‘Oriella PR Network Digital Journalism Study_2011’ and discussing a few key findings from the report; this quickly got picked up by some people on twitter who were in attendance. (website link here).

Of most interest was how twitter and Facebook were used to (a) find stories and (b) verify stories.

 

With nearly half the journalists polled saying they use twitter to find stories, along with just over a third using Facebook, perhaps it should not be surprising that over a fifth of journalists were using Facebook/twitter to verify stories.  However, this latter point raised the hackles of most of the panel with the general opinion being that these were not authoritative sources and should not be used to confirm facts.

Mark from the IoS was particularly scathing of a general decline in standards of journalism of which he saw this as only one example.

The debate carried on with discussion of the regulation of blogs/citizen journalism.  I asked a question whether the panel felt that if more control/regulation was introduced, there would be a shift to new platforms that provided unrestricted/anonymous opportunities to air their views; the Mark on the panel responded that there have been and there would continue to be attempts to control libellous conversation, but Andrew Bowman highlighted the difficulty of calling to account bloggers or sites across international boundaries.

This seemed to be a theme with the panel having a mixed view of citizen journalists (‘make all journalism look amateurish’, ‘actually, I think social media is rather fun’), generally accepting view of journalists using social media, (‘it is expected of journalists now’, ‘I would never break a story on twitter’, ‘I don’t want stories pitched to me via twitter or Facebook – I have an intray full of PR’s’, ‘good for getting reactions to a story’) and reflecting that it is likely that many, if not all, publications are likely to end up in exclusively digital formats at some point.

The response to the latter was that there would still be a need for hard copy versions of papers, citing New York as an example where people still read newspapers on the Metro, as opposed to Londoners, where iPad or similar news reading device is common.

My conclusion from the event is that there are poles of opinion around the use of Social Media by journalists and lack of confidence in how to treat it in the newsroom.  My view on what the response of professional journalists should be was summed up by a message I tweeted during the event:

There is absolutely a role for serious and authoritative journalism on digital platforms – when we see a story that we’re not sure about, we turn to the BBC, CNN or similar sites which are regarded as ‘proper news’ and that stories will be well-researched and facts checked.