Journalism & Social Media

It was refreshing to listen to @heleenvanlier, social media journalist of the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, at the Viva la Focus Festival Groningen. This time not a keynote about philosophical or political implications of the use of social media, but practical guidelines for journalism and use cases instead. Her job is bringing the news out and pull the data in!

Bringing the news out: to Twitter, to Facebook and to Hyves (like every respectable newspaper is doing). More interesting is the other side of this coin; bringing the data in. It looks like the role of journalism is changing from creating content to invoke and filtering social data streams:

• Identifying trends (what’s going on).
• Finding sources
• Mashing: enrich editorial content with related relevant social media streams
• Following and initiate conversations: for example between politicians

Personal branding
If social media is becoming the main data source, the abundance and differentiation of this data needs adequate filtering. Although the field of semantic filtering is evolving, the relevance can best be assured by individuals (journalists). If filtering is becoming the most important role of journalism, it’s likely that the individual journalist is becoming the brand, more than the newspaper is.

Will future newspapers be mashups of social feeds filtered and enriched by individual journalists?

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