Many people in the media industry have been blaming the emergence of social media for a sudden slowdown of traditional media business.  There is however another possible explanation. The problem may be that the culture in which the media exist is changing, not simply the business model. This problem may not be a case of a flawed business sense, but instead a flawed grasp on the culture which is evolving and possibly moving past the current traditional media.

The degradation of the journalistic industry began long before the emergence of the Web, let alone Web 2.0. People started to lose their trust in journalists many years ago, they began to feel that the media was no longer serving them in the same fashion they had been, and began to look for other sources of news. Web 2.0 is simply the most recent placeholder for our search for news. Web 2.0 also fits exactly what we’re trying to find from an alternative news source. This is not a case of Web 2.0 stealing people from traditional media sources, but simply the people who wanted to jump ship from traditional media finally finding the island they need to swim to.

A problem presented is that the traditional media outlets are not effectively using social media. They have a knee-jerk reaction that they need to use Twitter, they need to use Flickr, they need to use blogs. They simply use it as an advertisement, glorified commercials. The true value of social media is to build connections and relationships with viewers, as well as gain instant and interactive feedback. This feedback helps the corporation to build and improve both its social media operations and its traditional media operations. It is this synthesis of both social media and traditional media that will help the established corporations move forward into the future while maintaining a strong and healthy relationship with the viewing public.

Skoler, Michael. “Why the News Media Became Irrelevant–And How Social Media Can Help.” Nieman Reports 63.3 (2009): 38-40. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

To Picard, the real issue with social media is that it can become an expensive endeavor. He believes that because each platform you use requires its own planning, its own strategy, its own promotion. Therefore, if traditional media outlets choose to incorporate social media, it can double or triple the amount of intangible work they must perform. To Picard, if this doesn’t double the amount of traffic or profit you’re making, then it doesn’t make sense to double or triple the amount of work.

Picard doesn’t believe that it is always imprudent to incorporate the social media techniques into traditional media outlets, but that it requires very precise planning in order to make it a success. He believes that you need to have clearly demarcated goals, and deviating from them at all, there can be a significant loss of revenue, and loss of viewer/readership if it is incorrectly performed.

Picard does not have the same starry-eyed optimism about social media that many people seem to have. He clearly shows that he has a pragmatic view of social media, that it can have a positive effect, but careful planning and implementation are necessary for this to occur.

Picard, Robert. “Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business..” Nieman Reports 63.3 (2009): 10-12. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

Online, National Geographic boasts 14.8 million unique visitors per month. Its TV channels reach 290 million homes in 164 countries. Its branded books are distributed in 47 countries and translated into 32 languages. Its 2,500-plus licensed products are sold in 5,000 retail outlets. (While stopping short of sharing numbers, the company calls its licensed products “highly profitable.”) This year, National Geographic opened up its archive of more than 10 million iconic photographs, making some of them available for purchase and creating a series of exhibitions. The company also sponsors live events and travel expeditions and has produced filmed entertainment, mobile products and games—and along the way, it has built up a consumer database of a mind-boggling 82 million names.

These numbers, at first glance impressive are even more impressive when you consider all the different means of dissemination which are represented here. National Geographic has shown itself able to evolve with each new emergent form of media. They’ve dominated TV, books, and the Internet. The National Geographic brand has become one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

National Geographic and its online brand is a great example of how established traditional brands can make the successful shift to the social media sphere without compromising its traditional media output. NG ha established a strong online presence, a strong social presence, and a strong traditional presence. It manages to show that just because a brand has established itself in one sphere, it doesn’t mean that it cannot excel in another one.  Brands like NG’s are certainly a rarity in today’s world, but if more established brands follow its example, they too can establish themselves in multiple spheres.

Case, Tony. “121-year-old publisher proves it can learn plenty of new media tricks..” Advertising Age 80.35 (2009): 15. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

Many times, beginning a blog involves bringing in someone who knows their way around web design or webmastering, and not all small papers may have people like this already on staff. Therefore, it could necessitate either hiring a new employee or re-training a current employee, both of which represent significant investment. These small papers, which have been shrinking and blinking out of existence with higher and higher frequency are willing to do anything to try and stay in business.

Some papers are moving some of their operations to the Web because they have a dedicated reader base who would follow the paper to the Web. The tools of Web 2.0 also make it easier to interact with their readers, providing them with more than simply letters to the editor to gauge the emotions and opinions of their readers. In the piece “Connecting with readers: How newspapers
in Kansas are using Web 2.0″, Rudy Taylor a newspaper publisher who diversified into Web 2.0 said

“I’ve found, however, that over time, a few consistent commenters have started
helping me police the blog,” he says. “These days, when someone takes me to
task, it is pretty common for a few commenters to come to my defense, which is
cool since that so rarely happens in the newspaper.”

This sense of community that pervades much of the culture of Web 2.0 is attractive to small newspapers. The community they build around their blogs can serve to police and help maintain the website or blog, which frees up resources for the newspaper. This sense of co-operation and community certainly helps these papers significantly since their resources are limited to begin with.

Anderson, Les, and Amy DeVault. “Connecting with readers: How newspapers in Kansas are using Web 2.0.” Grassroots Editor 50.4 (2009): 7-11. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

This piece, from Communication World, helps to flesh out this image by giving us information on the effects of social media in other regions of the world.  From the developing world in Liberia and India, to the former Eastern bloc in Poland, and the Caribbean with Barbados, this provides a more complete snapshot of the world’s true interpretation of social media.

In Barbados, the influence of social media is quite understated. The writer speaks about how the potential usefulness of viral marketing is lost on Barbados businessmen and women, but holds hope for the future. In India, social media is being used primarily for marketing, and budgets for companies are changing to take advantage of this opportunity. In Liberia, lack of access and government control of other media is stifling development of social media in the country. In Poland, there is a Polish doppelganger of Twitter known as Blip. It is used more for personal use than for commercial use, as a result, Polish businesses are missing out on the opportunity to grow their businesses through Web 2.0.

It is important that businesses in developing countries take steps to reach out to the Internet both to grow their international profile, but also to help grow their domestic profile as well. In some countries where there is disjointed access to media,  or strict government control of other forms of media,  businesses could be able to reach more people if they “go viral” using social media.

Piesiewicz, Jusryna, Shael Sharma, and Christal McIntosh. “Is social media changing the way communicators in your country relate to the press and the public? If so, how?.” Communication World 27.1 (2010): 13-13. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

This TED talk, from Clay Shirky, provides some interesting points on social media. He talks about the technological evolution of media, and the effects it has had. The Internet, through its unique construction, allows for the Internet to overtake certain other media and integrate them into itself, as through streaming TV shows, VOIP telephone, and online magazines. It also allows for conversation and broadcast at the same time. This is a shift from the typical top-down or one-to-one conversation models from previous forms of media. The Internet allows lateral conversation with large groups of people, either by a person sending their blog out to people, and then those readers can discuss with each other. Thus, the group is conversing and broadcasting at the same time.

One example used by Shirky is an earthquake in China, and its relation to the Great Firewall of China. The Great Firewall is a term for the intensive suppression and censorship of the Internet which takes place in China. When the earthquake happened, people instantly began posting photos, video and text describing what was happening to sites like Twitter, and Chinese analogues of it. As a result, the Chinese government had to take immediate action to provide aid to the people in order to keep from losing standing on the international stage. In previous events, the Chinese government had tried to keep events like this as covered up as possible in order to be able to neglect the needs of the people while still maintaining its reputation. The crowdsourced news from China actually was the first information on the earthquake, beating even the American Geological Survey’s reports.

In response to this event, the Chinese government actually blocked all access to Twitter, because there was simply no effective way to filter the content coming out of China. They had taken every precaution to keep outside information out of China, but they had no plan for keeping information inside China.

It is hard to say that there are no differences between the way that traditional media and social media report the news. The two forms of media operate under completely different ground rules. If we compare online newspaper articles to blogs, since that is the closest to the traditional/social split, we still see marked differences. One major difference is that the traditional news media is expected to be fair and balanced, while bloggers don’t have this same expectation of them, and are able to be as biased as they see fit with little to no recourse.

One topic which both these forms of media pick up on is reporting of crises. This is important because it provides an almost perfect snapshot through which to compare the two. This is exactly what Brooke Fisher Liu examines in her paper “Distinguishing how elite newspapers and A-list blogs cover crises: Insights for managing crises online”.

This paper identified many differences and a few similarities between how traditional media and social media report the news. For one thing, in sticking with the commonly-held standard of objectivity and transparency, the traditional news media used many more quotes from official sources, while the social media used significantly less. It also had an interesting challenge to a commonly held belief:

Lesson 3: Blogs do not always scoop online newspapers. As predicted, the crisis coverage start date differed between blogs and online newspapers for most, but not all, of the crises. These findings indicate that A-list blogs are not always more likely to cover political crises before elite online newspapers, contradicting previous research

This is an interesting topic, in that it shows that there is still much to figure out as far as differences and similarities between the traditional media and emergent social media. Much research will surely be done into this area, and only time will tell whether the difference is as severe as once thought.

Liu, Brooke Fisher. “Distinguishing how elite newspapers and A-list blogs cover crises: Insights for managing crises online .” Public Relations Review 36.1 (2010): n. pag. Web. 13 Feb 2010.

One of the most important effects that media has is what is known as “agenda-setting”. Through agenda-setting, the purveyors of media are able to set the agenda, that is, push certain issues forward while playing down other issues which they want to be seen as less important. Through the selective promotion of certain news stories, the media provider is able to tell us not necessarily what to think, but certainly what it is we should be thinking about.

This is where social media once again serves to change things up. Though the research is uncommon, most research on gatekeeping and Web 2.0 tells us that it is as effective at agenda-setting as traditional media, but it often chooses to pursue items which are less easy to push to set the agenda.

An interesting sidenote to this is that the traditional media companies are jumping into the blogosphere with their own newsroom bloggers, attempting to steal some thunder from popular news blogs such as the Huffington Post.  These newsroom bloggers are interesting because they are skewed towards traditional media, and as a result, much of their online content is simply re-directing the reader towards the newspaper or tv company they work for, instead of towards diverse Internet sources.

Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics social media blog expresses many of the sentiments that we have delivered in this blog about the new power and popularity of social media. It is designed to cover the latest trends in social media, and what these trends mean for businesses and individual users alike. One of the ideas that I liked was the idea of the social media revolution. This idea makes summarizes the utility of including social media in marketing and business, and how the fast-growing sector of the Internet has changed how we view the world today. Check out the video that Qualman created about this revolution:

If you turn to about the 3:29 mark, there is a connection with information I received from a lecture with Dr. Strangelove, about the idea of marketers using the ability to track our behavior within media and our spending habits to create personalized advertising for us. Qualman agrees that now the news is coming to us, and he says in the video that “in the near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media”. This introduces another use for social media even for broadcasters, where they can determine what shows we would be most interested in watching by our activity on the Internet, and could therefore more easily direct us to the content that we need. This is a way that television could use new media to achieve its own ends. Thank you for visiting our blog, and please make sure to view our video.

Source: http://socialnomics.net/about/
Strangelove, Michael. The empire of mind. Lecture presented at the University of Ottawa on February 10, 2010.

Dick lists a bunch of important statistics first on a bunch of popular social media and social networking websites. For Twitter, Dick notes that the website grew 77% between February and March of 2009 alone. As of August 2009, Twitter had 7 million unique monthly visitors. As for Facebook? Dick notes that it had doubled its users in less than 8 months, and at that time had 200 million users. He jokes that “if Facebook were a country, it would be larger than Brazil”.

Most importantly, Brad Dick mentions that although he at first thought that Twitter was in the “young and worthless” category, but after the recession hit he found that it proved very useful to gain information in his field in particular:

I discovered behind-the-scenes news and insider information that was not available from the traditional media. Best of all, much of the information appeared before the news media picked it up. I discovered that Twitter was providing me with an important insight into my workspace and industry. I saw tomorrow’s headlines today.

Due to the fact that social media is consistent with the rest of the Internet in that it allows for mass participation from people all over the globe, it is not easy to fathom how it could be much faster at picking up and displaying news than all broadcasters put together. But what could this mean for broadcast news? Will it eventually become obsolete. Admittedly, television holds some power in that it is able to deliver better sound and picture quality to the media user. But for speed, there is no comparison. And in this day of quick gratification, as I mentioned in an earlier post, speed is power.

Source: http://blog.broadcastengineering.com/brad/2009/08/31/will-social-media-kill-television/