Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Thursday, December 4, 2008 2:28 - 3 Comments
Journalists opening up on social media
Traditionally journalists — especially print — have hid behind bylines and their professional personas.
In the name of objectivity, journalists were told to keep their personal lives separate from their professional work. Journalists just reported the news and that was that (just the finished product, not the journey). That worked fine in a pre-Internet world.
But honestly, how many people on Twitter have a lot of followers acting like that? Virtually none. Same with bloggers.
The Web is an interactive medium, and who wants to interact with a robot? Professor Carrie Brown created a thought provoking video about journalists opening up on social media. In fact, she argues that journalists must open up on social media to harness the platform properly.
“I don’t think social media will really work for journalists, unless we are willing to share a little bit about ourselves and our personalities,” Brown said in the video.
The idea is not to write about issues like politics, who you voted for or other divisive topics, but rather to become more human. Beat blogger Ron Sylvester also has made the same point earlier this year. He has tweeted about how he injured his knee, and it has humanized him to readers.
“People come to social media with a different set of expectations,” Brown said. “They want to see that there is kind of a real person with a personality behind the byline.”
Then there is a the Colonel Tribune approach. The Colonel is not a real person, of course, but it’s a fun and fascinating online persona that Tribune Interactive has created. The Colonel approach might only work once per paper, but it is interesting how people positively respond to a fake persona (instead of the robot approach that other papers have tried).
This is a tricky road to navigate, however. The last thing journalists would want to do is to turn off potential readers. So, where is the line?
How human should journalists become on social networks? Does your news organization have rules about how to act on social media? Are you allowed to open up?
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Technolo-J : The rise of social media and the demise of newspapers
[...] information.To succeed in that arena we have to be social. Patrick Thornton guides us with on Beatblogging.org dealing with how have have to stop hiding behind bylines and put ourselves out there.“I don’t [...]
Technolo-j » Blog Archive » The rise of social media and the demise of newspapers
[...] succeed in that arena we have to be social. Patrick Thornton guides us with on Beatblogging.org dealing with how have have to stop hiding behind bylines and put ourselves out [...]
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Thanks, Patrick. I agree that this is indeed a tricky road to navigate. I guess that my thought on that might be just to start small and begin to develop some guidelines as you go along. I think that the more time you spend using social media like Twitter etc., the more you start to just get a feel for how much is too much. (I had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook myself, for example, and now I love it.) Follow other journalists like many you feature on this site and see what they are doing. Think about ways you can talk not only about yourself but about your journalism. I think we forget how little the public knows about how we do what we do, how we aren’t just this monolith known as “the media” but real people who work very hard and got into the business to make a difference.
You might consider checking out this brilliant paper my friend Doreen Marchionni wrote about journalism as conversation that outlines much of the research I talked about in the video. It was an award-winner at the AEJMC conference in August. grantmeaccess.com/ConExpAEJ.doc