Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Charlie Beckett's post is a must-read...

...That is a very broad brief, but luckily, that is what I spend my time thinking about. I spent 20 years as a traditional TV journalist making documentaries and editing news programmes at the BBC and ITN before setting up Polis, the media think tank at the LSE five years ago. When I joined ITN in 1999 they had one Internet terminal that you had to ask to use. Mobile phones were rationed. Now my iPhone has more computing power than the whole BBC newsroom a decade ago. And remember Moores Law that means computing power doubles every 18 months. So whatever is changing now will probably change again – but quicker.

I hope I can use this hour to set out some ideas and a few case studies. I am going to talk mainly about social media in connection with conflict and politics – as that seems most relevant to you – although I am not going to analyse NATO’s media role in particular in any great detail. I think we have a second session where I can respond more precisely to questions from you on how it relates to NATO or your experience in particular.

Can you tweet faster than an earthquake travels? Twitter thinks so:Here's Twitter traffic mentioning earthquakes in the 12 minutes after the quake: I wonder how many news outlets had information up on their site within 12 minutes?

The wealth of multimedia or social media storytelling tools available can be bewildering for journalists. Often seasoned pros asked me, what is the one thing I should learn and add to my reporting toolkit?

To my mind, that’s the right attitude but the wrong question. Journalists need to be open to new ways of telling stories and engaging with audiences. But it is not about adding a new tool to your reporting repertoire.

Instead it is about figuring out how to rethink reporting to ensure it remains compelling, relevant and impactful....

If journalists don’t stand up to take ownership of this exciting new medium and build great things on it, the engineers and the MBAs will. In the news businesses that will emerge, journalists will continue to remain at the bottom of the Excel sheet of layoff-ability.

That is indeed what has been happening, when a lawyer builds the web’s most important technology news site (Michael Arrington – Techcrunch) or two engineers build the most exciting magazine App for tablets and phones (Flipboard). A former equity research analyst edits one of the most popular business news websites (Henry Blodget – Businessinsider). Journalists of the traditional mould don’t quite dictate things in these companies....