Social media drives News. News drives social media.
On the day of writing this article, a friend sent me a link on Facebook to a funny advertisement on Gumtree for an old Subaru Brumby. A couple of hours later I forwarded this around the office and immediately got a reply showing that due to the popularity of the page, a story had been written about it on smh.com.au.
Conversely, when Julia Gillard gave her famous misogyny parliament speech to Tony Abbott earlier this year, social media posts went into overdrive. There is an endless amount of examples that show how the two forms of media have become dependent on each other – with social media driving new story leads, and the media delivering this content to a mass audience through active online conversation. All news is now designed to be commented on, liked and shared.
The mix of social media and traditional news content is an interesting spiral of change and it’s hard to see what the result of the mixing the two will be. For the time being, services like Twitter and Facebook are great journalistic tools; providing inspiration, background details and additional content for news stories making them topical and virtually instant. Going forward it will be interesting to see just how these tools affect the credibility of the news content we receive.
As a consequence of working in the media industry, I think we all too often think about media from a buyer's perspective and not as a consumer. News was always something that I was genuinely interested in growing up. I would read the newspaper from cover to cover every morning and would often watch two or three episodes of news coverage every night. These days it very rarely interests me.
While I’ve only mentioned a few points above about the changes I have personally witnessed as a consumer, it is clear that there has been a fundamental shift in the news content being produced – hopefully this isn’t to the detriment of once credible news sources.
Read part one here.
Sam McGroder
Implementation Planner
Starcom Mediavest