Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Sunday, February 24, 2008 15:41 - View Comments

Should Journalists Use Social Networking Services for Sourcing?

The author of New Media Bytes asks a list-serv of journalists and gets varied responses.

There is no black and white answer – but I think it’s a conversation all newsrooms should be having.

Whenever I want to reconnect with someone, I first look to online social networks, such as Facebook and Linked in. I imagine a host of people use social networks for the very same purpose.

So why shouldn’t journalists?

I posed this question to a list serv that includes several journalists I worked with at my college paper, and some didn’t think too favorably of using social media to find sources.

Here’s some of the responses:

  • Journalist Marty Weil: Weil says Linked In can be a great source for finding the right sources and also a good place for generating feature story ideas.
  • Journalist Michelle Vranizan Rafter: Rafter uses the service as a virtual Rolodex and also uses the Linked In Answers to find potential sources.

What do you think? Is it time to integrate social media into the news gathering process?

  blog it

Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.



  • http://www.ComHacker.org Trisha

    Definitely yes. Twitter especially is one of those things that really helps in catching on to things before they become yesterday’s news. Like this post you’ve got here, I know about it before your RSS subscribers because of Twitter.

    Then of course you have the amazing capacity for social media to come out with really quick and useful answers.

    I say, if you know how to use it, do!

blog comments powered by Disqus
About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.