Newsphobia

Last week I attended the Media140 conference at the ABC studios in Ultimo. Journalists, bloggers, media nerds, students and politicians (and their ghost Twitter writers) gathered to discuss what appears to be the top two topics the self-obsessed media are focused on right now:  Twitter and “Oh crap, how will I be paid for journalism now?”.

The first entry is all about the darling of the social media circuit: Twitter.

Earlier this year, I said on this blog that I believed that journalists should not be using Twitter as a replacement for vox pops. While I stand by that original assessment, Twitter has really become much more than what I envisioned it to be over the past year. It is less something journalists have a vague curiosity about and more something that many journalists are now participating in. In the past 10 months we’ve seen it play a vital role in the reporting of events such as the Iran election, Michael Jackson’s death, and more locally the dust storm that spread over Sydney. The combination of widespread media coverage, celebrity Tweeters and through the use of hashtags and trending topics, Twitter users are now more aware of how their tweets may be seen and are able to make their tweets easier to find for people following these topics, journalists or not. Tweeters using hashtags are now actively choosing to have this information spread, meaning it has now changed from being a more passive source of information for journalists to one where the journalist is more part of the Twitter community.

We’ve seen mainstream media journalists such as Leigh Sales, Mark Colvin, Annabel Crabb and Caroline Overington all enter the Twitterverse and actively engage with other Twitter users, linking to their content and even tweeting during Question Time. All of whom were present at the Media140 conference on Thursday and at the conference, ABC Managing Director Mark Scott also announced a new set of social media guidelines for all ABC journalists and staff. These guidelines are the first in Australia (that have been published) and make it clear that,  for at least the ABC, it is important to ensure journalists are using social media ethically.

Thankfully, apart from Chris “Five Times” Ulhmann, all of the mainstream media journalists at the conference recognised the value of Twitter as a tool for journalists and none saw it as a fad. All of them believed that the use of Twitter should for sourcing should be treated no differently from how journalists would normally source information, and the same checks must be applied otherwise journalists risk, as Annabel Crabb put it, from having a “Richard Wilkins moment”. Crabb also stated she used Twitter as a means to take notes while sharing the goings-on during Question Time and often pinched the funnier replies she got on Twitter for her column (crediting where possible). Leigh Sales showed us that journalists can be personal and casual on Twitter while still maintaining their brand as a journalist through the simple slogan “if in doubt, leave it out”, meaning anything you hesitate about sharing with your followers, just don’t.

What really stood out is that none of the journalists present had a condescending view of their followers on Twitter. They saw it as a communication tool and a method of collaboration and research. One of the more frequent discussions in social media is whether Twitter will eventually kill and replace Facebook but I think the last few months have shown that both are completely different entities capable of co-existing without tearing a hole in the space-time continuum. Facebook is still much more personal and private means of communication for the vast majority of us (and thus still rather ethically grey for journalists who still trawl Facebook for the digital deathknock) but Twitter is a much more open community for sharing information.

Now that the world gotten over the initial Twitter hype, Twitter still isn’t voxpopping; it’s a conversation everyone is in on.