Can journalists survive on Facebook and Twitter alone?
There has been much talk over the past year or so regarding social networking sites’ ability to be legitimate news sources. But can the likes of Facebook and Twitter really hope to replace more traditional news sources in years to come? That’s exactly what a new experiment is setting out to discover.
There’s no doubt that the reporting of news, and the means by which we access it, is changing. The biggest change is, obviously, as a result of the Web providing instant, up-to-date reporting of news from around the world. The Internet, along with 24-hour news channels on TV, has made the idea of waiting a whole day to find out what has been happening by reading a newspaper seem ludicrous.
But even the big players on the Web are facing a challenge to stay ahead, with social networking sites having exhibited their power in recent months by allowing ordinary people, sometimes referred to as citizen journalists, to report the news in real-time, right from the scene.
The problem is that Twitter and Facebook aren’t always the most accurate sources. There are rumors of celebrity deaths started every day on these sites, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. People will still, usually, need to check a story with a legitimate news site before truly believing it to be real and accurate.
According to MSN, five European journalists are about to test this theory in an intriguing experiment. From Feb. 1, the quintet will be locked away in a French farmhouse and have all means of obtaining news taken away from them apart from Facebook and Twitter. For five days, they will use these two sites exclusively in order to build a picture of what is happening in the wider world and report it live on air to the respective radio stations they belong to.
Helene Jouan, a senior editor at France Inter, said:
This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter. Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources.
This is an intriguing experiment which I’m keen to hear the results of. My guess is that the journalists will manage OK using just the social networking sites they’ll have access to. However, one or two rogue stories are likely to slip by, and that would prove that the pronouncements that Facebook and Twitter are the only sites we now need are overzealous.
You can follow the journalists’ progress on Twitter, unsurprisingly.
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