Journalism in the age of social media

Facebook, twitter! social networking sites that have re-defined news reporting and journalism. Today journalist are more concerned about what they post on their twitter accounts than what they 'read' to their audience in the main stream, my use of the word ‘read’ is not accidental, for today I doubt the existence of too many true ‘news reporters’. There are still a few true journalists out there, but for the majority of them they are just Government press release readers.

The advent of twitter provides an alternative to the traditional mainstream news reporting and Journalism, but the current state of it’s being used irritates me. It’s absolutely stupid, irrational and illogical why an individual’s twitter news feed should be of a great importance to the audience than the mainstream news reporting, or perhaps ‘news reading’; thanks to their stupid selfish campaign to gather followers on their personal twitter pages.

You see I don’t have any problem with twitter or Journalists having twitter accounts, but it becomes unfair when the people who pay their taxes to sustain the operation of Corporations like BBC are coaxed into following their reporters on twitter for the latest news updates. In fact at some point the BBC wanted to force all its employees to have the BBC subscript in their twitter user names. Since when has sitting in front of a camera and reporting news become so much less efficient than typing and posting a sentence on twitter.

Twitter and other social networking sites are great innovations and they provide an avalanche of opportunities for the media to reach the younger audience group, but when what username I use becomes an important issue or when TV news reporting is dominated by advertising campaigns for twitter following, then you begin to wonder if the customer’s satisfaction is at heart.

It is undoubtedly obvious that every journalist would want to be the first to break important news, and of course the best way to do this is through their twitter accounts, no wonder today most news we see in the mainstream media are already trending or perhaps archived in twitter and Facebook. It’s this latter selfish and stupid usage of the social media by journalists that irritates me, not because I cannot have a twitter or a Facebook account, but because for justice to the tax payer who cannot or doesn't wish to have a twitter account, for s/he deserves much better than the current state of selfish social media news ‘reading’. And yes news ‘reading’............again.