Uncategorized - by Patrick Thornton on Monday, May 19, 2008 10:08 - 0 Comments

To Find Out How the Water Is – You Have to Dive In Yourself


…I talked about news as a conversation. But until I started reading more blogs and getting involved in social media, I didn’t understand how quickly news gets shared, expanded, commented on, filtered and repurposed across the web. This is not a trivial thing. People once relied on the news to inform conversation. Now they are relying on the conversation to inform them about the news. If something’s important, they figure they’ll hear about it.


…I considered myself an early adopter. But until I saw how the best bloggers used social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic and FriendFeed as reporting resources and channels for distributing content (the beauty of community, after all, is that it allows you to gather and share information more efficiently), I didn’t realize how far behind we really were in harnessing the power of these new tools.


To expand on that last point a bit, when I started work on this piece I posted a short question on Twitter:

  blog it


Subscribe to BeatBlogging.Org via RSS.



Leave a Reply

Comment

About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.Org examines how journalists can use social networks, blogs and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.

Follow our social media maven @MsBeat on Twitter.

Interested in writing for BeatBlogging.Org? Become a guest writer.

About the Author
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @jiconoclast on Twitter.
Most popular posts