The Impact of Social Media on Journalism: Popularity, Business Models, and Implications, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Mass Communication

Download The Impact of Social Media on Journalism: Popularity, Business Models, and Implications and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Mass Communication in PDF only on Docsity! WORKING PAPER e rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism: A study of how newspapers and broadcasters in the UK and US are responding to a wave of participatory social media, and a historic shi in control towards individual consumers. Nic Newman September 2009 Newman Working paper cover_Layout 1 03/09/2009 16:56 Page 1 3 time, social media sites could become as important as search engines as a driver of traffic and revenue. The issues and conclusions are framed within a wider debate about the importance of these developments to the changing shape of mainstream media organisations, to levels of civic engagement, debates about quality, trust and accuracy, and to discussions about the practice and future of journalism itself. KEYWORDS: social media; social networks; blogs; user generated content; online; newspapers; broadcasting; future journalism; Facebook; Twitter 4 1. Framing the debate Ten years ago, an influential McKinsey report1 concluded that new technologies were set to increase our capacity to interact by a factor of between two and five. They argued that our enhanced interactive capacity would ‘create new ways to configure businesses, organise companies, and serve customers’. These developments are not just playing out between businesses, they are profoundly impacting almost every sphere of life – with journalism on the front line. In developed societies the adoption of email, instant messaging and mobile messaging has been rapid and widespread. But in more recent years, there has been a rise in popularity of powerful new tools, associated with the improved capacity of the internet to handle two-way interaction – message boards, blogs, wikis and social networks. These tools are sometimes grouped by the phrase ‘Social Media’,2 and often they are associated with ‘Web 2.0’,3 popularised by the internet entrepreneur Tim O Reilly to make the case that the internet only reaches its true potential when people take advantage of its interactive capability and the power of the network. Web 2.0 advocates argue that the internet should not be just another form of distribution for big media companies but is an opportunity for a flowering of new creative expression (the read-write web). In the news and information sphere, the dramatic street protests, following the Iranian elections of June 2009 provided just the latest example of how these new internet tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have begun to change the way media is produced, distributed and consumed. The role of participatory and social media in Iran and earlier examples such as the Mumbai attacks in 2008 have caused New York academic and blogger Jeff Jarvis to argue that ‘the witnesses are taking over the news’,4 that we are witnessing a historic shift of control from traditional news organisations to the audience themselves. The one-way nature of the media so far has been an unnatural state, argues Jarvis, due to limitations of production and distribution. He says that, properly done, news can be a democratising force and that it should be a conversation between those who know and those who want to know, with journalists in their new roles as curators, enablers, organisers, educators – helping where they can.5 1 Patrick Butler, Ted W. Hall, Alista ir M. Hanna, et al., A Revolution in Interaction (McKinsey Quarterly, 1997). 2 Wikipedia definition: ‘At its most basic sense, socia l media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content . It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Businesses also refer to socia l media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).’ 3 Tim O’Reil ly: ‘Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use the harnessing of collective intel l igence.’ (http://radar.oreil ly.com/archives/2006/12/web_20_compact.html) 4 Jeff Jarvis, Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/01/mumbai-terror- digita l-media). 5 Jeff Jarvis, foreword to Charlie Beckett, Supermedia: Saving Journalism so it can Save the World (Blackwell, 2008). 5 On the other side of the debate, former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen says the ‘cult of the amateur’ is undermining great companies who have consistently created value through imparting quality information and education. Keen says that we need to fight back, to retain the structures and profession that are in danger of dying out, taking with them concepts such as quality and trust: The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people … but every week a new revelation calls into question the accuracy reliability and trust of the information we get from the internet.6 Although issues such as accuracy and standards are at the heart of the current debate within journalism, scholars and commentators see these issues as part of a much wider change in the media landscape. Futurologist Paul Saffo talks of the shift from mass media to personal media. He believes many traditional publishers will fall by the wayside in the process: The Mass Media revolution 50 years ago delivered the world to our TVs, but it was a one-way trip – all we could do was press our nose against the glass and watch. In contrast, Personal Media is a two-way trip and we not only can, but also expect to be able to answer back.7 For academics like Clay Shirky, the key change is the internet’s ability to support ‘many to many’ conversations, in addition to the ‘one to many’ broadcast model. Now he says, members of the former audience can talk directly to each other, leading to the ‘largest increase in expressive capability in human history’.8 Sociologist William Dutton at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) argues that we are witnessing the emergence of powerful new voices and networks which can act independently of the traditional media. He has termed these developments the emergence of the ‘Fifth Estate’: Highly ‘Networked individuals’ (helped by new platforms like social networking and messaging) can move across, undermine and go beyond the boundaries of existing institutions. This provides the basis for the pro-social networks that compose what I am calling the Fifth Estate.9 Although it is early days, Dutton believes that the Fifth Estate could be as important to the twenty-first century as the Fourth Estate has been since the eightenth. From influential bloggers to community networks and activists, this new sphere of activity offers new competition for the mainstream media. These groups are becoming an alternative source of news, as well as another option for politicians, businessmen or other public figure to bypass them and take their message – unmediated – to their supporters or followers. And as if to add insult to injury, these new networks and individuals are also now 6 Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture (Broadway Business, 2007). 7 Paul Saffo, ‘Farewell Information, it’s a Media Age’, 2008 (http://www.saffo.com/essays/essay_farewell info.pdf). 8 Clay Shirky, ‘How Social Media can Make History’, TED conference address, 2009 (http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_ history.html). 9 Will iam H. Dutton, Through the Network of Networks: The Fifth Estate (Oxford Internet Institute, 2007). 8 looking for case studies and audience contributions, answering around 20 queries a day from across the BBC. Figure 1. BBC user-generated hub solicits for stories, pictures and videos. The BBC is careful to authenticate photos, videos and eyewitnesses before they are used in output. There are occasional exceptions, such as during the Burmese (2007) and Iranian (2009) protests, when it proved impossible to verify how and where some footage was shot. In these cases, an editorial judgement was made about the authenticity and the pictures were broadcast with caveats and appropriate labelling. The BBC’s user-generated initiatives have brought a number of scoops and new perspectives to its journalism. The BBC was contacted by an HBOS whistleblower (February 2009)14 and a regular series of City Diaries15 (blog- like contributions) brought extra texture to coverage of the credit crunch. On international stories, the activities of the hub unearthed powerful and rare voices caught up in the fighting in Afghanistan’s SWAT valley (June 2009).16 The incorporation of user-generated material is valued both by the BBC and by audiences, according to a 2007 MORI survey. The survey, part of a wider study into UGC at the BBC, showed that 72 per cent approved of the use of this material, feeling that it improved the quality and authenticity of output, and 61 per cent agreed that it was good for the public to be involved in producing the news.17 However the same study (Cardiff University 2007) also found antipathy towards traditional message board debates which publish opinion-based UGC, as opposed to comments based on direct 14 BBC News, ‘HBOS Risk Control Dumbed Down’, Feb. 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7892079.stm). 15 BBC News, ‘City Voices’, June 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8081484.stm). 16 BBC News, ‘Struggling for Survival in SWAT’, May 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8054143.stm). 17 The MORI survey was part of a study by Claire Wardle and Andrew Will iams, ugc@thebbc: Understanding its Impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and BBC News (Cardiff University, 2009). 9 experience. Charles, who took part in the focus groups, expressed a typical view: ‘I don't see the point. 99% of the people who call up or e-mail really don't add anything new to the debate.’ Within the BBC itself, there has also been frustration that debates can be dominated by a small number of users, whilst a perceived need to intervene and moderate has led to significant difficulties in processing the volumes of user-generated content. The BBC has reduced the number of comment-style debates, but Sam Taylor who manages the team, believes that particularly on big stories timely comments can still add useful perspective: We never claim they have a scientific basis and we are fully aware of the flaws and the holes, but you do get an immediate and real sense of what is going on. It helps make an informed editorial judgement, in the way that you would with a tape full of vox pops.18 Indeed, on several occasions the strength and immediacy of reader opinion has influenced the BBC’s wider editorial line. Matthew Eltringham, Assistant Editor at the user-generated hub, recalls how strong and consistent negative reaction to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech on Sharia Law (9,000 emails) changed the agenda that afternoon, prompting the 6 o’clock news to ‘feature the strength of reaction and lead on the story’. One of the biggest changes in the last few years is the increased engagement with the BBC brand in third-party social media networks. In many cases, content from Flickr, Twitter and YouTube has been included in BBC output. The emergence of Twitter, in particular, as a source for breaking news has raised a series of new challenges around authenticity and representation. During the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the BBC was heavily criticised over the way it republished an unsubstantiated piece of information circulating on Twitter. Website Editor Steve Herrmann, who had to respond to complaints via the BBC Editor’s blog,19 says lessons have been learned and processes and guidelines tightened up: Audience feedback to my blog post showed three general reactions: a) Don't use Twitter and other informal sources – you are the BBC – we want solid gold facts and nothing else. b) Use social networks. It's intelligent to see what others know. c) Use both, but LABEL clearly, signpost, even keep them separate. Herrmann believes the BBC needs to continue to monitor and work with third-party networks. The trick, he says, is to find a way of reflecting ‘the unfolding truth in all its guises’ without jeopardising the BBC’s ability to get across the actual, verified facts.20 It is a difficult balance to strike, but the user- generated hub has now extended its remit to social networks, checking tweets for authenticity before publication. The BBC has expanded its use of live event commentary (mixing user comments with clearly labelled BBC facts and correspondent insights) on breaking news stories. In doing so, the corporation is building on the success of the live event pages pioneered by BBC Sport, which combine the latest 18 Author interview with Sam Taylor, May 2009. 19 BBC Editors Blog, 4 Dec. 2008 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/12/theres_been_discussion_see_eg.html). 20 Author interview with Steve Herrmann, June 2009. 10 action from a sporting event with user-generated backchat from a variety of sources. In this way, a new style of journalism seems to be emerging around live events in particular, which takes the form of an unfolding conversation in partnership with audiences. The BBC does not yet have a social media editor, but has published guidelines for blogs, which are being extended to Twitter. Head of Global News Richard Sambrook has been a great evangelist for the use of these tools, but accepts that rules and guidelines are now essential: Social media sites are the new towns, or cities or neighbourhood bars, the places where the public gather and discuss things. Just as you wouldn’t take a conversation from the neighbourhood bar and broadcast it as the truth, you need to do your own checking and verification and all those things still need to happen in your use of social media too. The recent debates over Twitter in many ways mirrored those over the adoption of blogging in 2005 and 2006. For several years, the BBC had been extremely suspicious about the blog format, like many other mainstream media organisations, regarding them as ‘amateurish, filled with errors and not credible’.21 Veteran BBC correspondent Kate Adie famously described some blogs as ‘egotistical nonsense’ and suggested that ‘journalists shouldn’t have any time to blog, there are too many stories waiting to be told’.22 However, by 2006, the BBC had launched almost 50 blogs including those of some of the BBC’s best known reporters, including political correspondent Nick Robinson whose informal style and understanding of the medium won over the sceptics. Figure 2. Politica l editor Nick Robinson is one of the most read bloggers in the UK. 21 Mark Tremayne, ‘Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesising Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media’, in Tremayne (ed.), Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media (Routledge, 2007). 22 Michael Mullane, ‘Why Kate Adie Hates Blogs’ (http://multimediameetsradio.typepad.com/ebu/2007/06/why_kate_adie_h.html). 13 group. Meg Pickard, who until recently ran communities at the Guardian, says a vocal minority can end up decimating the conversation and sometimes putting journalists off contributing. But Pickard says there are things that can be done to improve the quality of debate: We encourage journalists and contributors to respond to comments across the board not descending into arguments with individuals, but only respond to constructive comments, reward good behaviour. You have to show that it may not be the loudest voice, but the most constructive that gets the attention. The Guardian is considering a range of other innovations and is planning to enlist users to help tag and classify comments, to enable them to be filtered more effectively. Over the past twelve months one of the biggest changes at the Guardian has been the increased integration of social media tools like Twitter into journalistic workflows and audience facing output. The developments at the G20 are analysed in detail in Chapter 3 and a case study of Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss’s use of social media tools can be found in Chapter 4, but a measure of the shift in emphasis has been the appointment of Meg Pickard as the Guardian’s first Social Media Development Editor. The Guardian has already published internal best practice social media guidelines and is one of the first newspapers to publish a directory of correspondents on Twitter. An important part of the new role has also been to evangelise and train 200 Guardian journalists about how to use these tools most effectively as part of the production process.31 Pickard argues that journalists of the future will increasingly use these social networks to find and maintain interesting contacts and sources: Journalism has traditionally built relationships and networks with rolodexes and long lunches. Now Twitter and Facebook and blogs and RSS feeds are the long lunches of today’s world. Even more fundamentally, Guardian journalists are encouraged to see the publication of a story not as the end of the process, but as the start of a new set of possibilities; the start of a conversation with the audience: We are using user generated content not as a primary source but to extend the life of stories, as a way of adding more perspective and insight, not just as way to let people talk amongst themselves, but actually with a purpose to generate more leads and more insight. One recent example of this was during the MPs’ expenses scandal when audience members were enlisted to trawl through hundreds of thousands of receipts to help uncover new leads. 31 Author interview with Meg Pickard, June 2009. 14 Figure 3. The Guardian’s experiment in ‘networked journalism’, in partnership with audiences. In another example of working with audiences, user-submitted picture messages for President-elect Barack Obama were turned into a feature in the popular G2 section of the newspaper and also led to a spin-off book. Figure 4. Crowdsourced pictures in conjunction with Flickr the photo-sharing network. The Telegraph has also been at the forefront of experiments with social media, many successfully breaking new ground, but not everything has gone according to plan. During the UK budget in May 2009, the Telegraph published unfiltered tweets, 140 character short comments, directly on the website. It wasn’t long before some users had started to abuse this, adding offensive comments in place of the expected insight on the economic debate. The experiment was pulled. 15 Figure 5. Telegraph experiment with Twitter. Julian Sambles, head of audience development at the Telegraph, says the experiment was ‘a disappointment’, but argues that at this stage it remains important to take risks to understand what works and what does not.32 The incident did, however, affect Telegraph strategy in this area as the paper cannot afford the extra costs that would be required to moderate live events – so there will be no repeat. As social media moves out of the experimental phase and into regular production, it will need to demonstrate its value to editors, advertisers or both. There is a growing body of evidence that advertisers no longer see the quality of core content itself as sufficiently attractive and are becoming increasingly interested in engagement,33 as well in as targeting specific demographics. Newspapers which are able to build up information over time through a strong relationship with audiences may be able to charge a premium as new advertising models emerge. In the meantime, the Telegraph has detected a significant upsurge in the importance of social networks as a form of distribution. Over 8 per cent of all page views to the Telegraph Online now result from recommendations in networks like Digg, Facebook and Twitter.34 Indeed Julian Sambles believes that it is the content generated by mainstream media organisations that has increasingly become the lifeblood of social networks: The Telegraph has rich and diverse content, but we have to ensure that content can be found … The percentage of traffic from Social Networks will grow. How far can that go? It could be a third. It could be a half. I don’t know, but few people predicted ten years ago that Google would be as successful as it is today. In this way, Sambles believes that perhaps the most important message of social media for mainstream media organisations is to continue to invest in quality content that people want to talk about and share. 32 Author interview with Julian Sambles, June 2009. 33 Socia l media spends in UK are expected to grow 17% in 2009 (eMarketer, March 2009). Marketers are increasing online spends on socia l media (77%), search (76%), mobile (75%), behavioural (70%), and decreasing spends on display (45%) and research (23%) (Ad Media Partners, Jan. 2009). 34 Author interview with Julian Sambles, June 2009. 18 Figure 7. Crowdsourcing pictures around feature stories on nyt.com There are series of other examples where NYT.com has partnered with audiences to co-create content. In many cases, the Times has deliberately lowered the barriers to participation, in an effort to get more people engaged. On election day, they asked readers to enter a single word to describe their mood. Website users could sort between Obama and McCain supporters to get a different visual display. The same technique, explains Spruill, has been applied to the recession to map the trends and thoughts of employed and unemployed Americans:41 We are trying to think about creative ways to move beyond just article comments so I would say that part of the spirit of the time is to think about how to engage readers but in a way that is up to our standards but doesn’t just allow for ranting and uninteresting back and forth. The New York Times is applying the same filtering and selection aspects of the core brand to user-generated content and social media. Pretty much everything at the Times is checked and moderated. Whilst this does create problems of scaling, it is another example of how the culture of mainstream newspapers is blending with the norms and traditions of the open web, to create something else again. As Spruill says: ‘in some ways we are trying to adjust those old standards to the new world and figuring it out as we go along’. 2.5 Cable News Network (CNN) Like other leading news organisations in this study, CNN has been on a journey in its attitude to user participation. One of the first to adopt message boards, CNN closed them down when it found that the low quality of the discussion was undermining its reputation. Today it allows users to ‘sound- off’ about stories and blogs, but in a way that is strictly controlled through moderation. From the beginning, CNN has focused on the newsgathering potential of its worldwide audience, regularly soliciting for videos, pictures and comments on breaking stories such as the Virginia Tec shootings (2007) and 41 ‘Living with Less’ section is heavily infused with user-generated content (http://projects.nytimes.com/living-with- less). Author interview with Fiona Spruil l, June 2009. 19 California wildfires (2007). These UGC initiatives were initially grouped together within CNN under an iReport label, but over time the burden of moderating and verifying each item proved overwhelming, with over 10,000 video items received each month. So in 2008, CNN decided to split the brand from CNN and turn iReport into a separate UGC platform, where the quality and content of the contributions was managed by the community. iReport.com42 still provides CNN with a regular stream of user- generated content for its main TV output, but only those that have been vetted and verified will be used on air. This brand separation is considered essential to protect CNN’s reputation for trust and accuracy and is taken very seriously. Onscreen, user-generated content is clearly labelled iReport, whilst the community gets the kudos of an ‘on CNN’ label if an item is used. Every week, the numbers contributing to iReport are growing, with around 1000 submissions a week, of which around half are responses to assignments suggested by CNN; the other half are defined by the community itself.43 Figure 8. With iReport, CNN has developed a separate brand and website to handle UGC. Whilst the big news events have made the headlines, iReport senior producer Lila King says some of the most memorable moments have focused on more personal news stories, which she says have helped change the way CNN reports stories: One of the things that we saw during the 2008 election was an outpouring of support in terms of artistic expression for Obama … we started to see a trend from students posting portraits built out of the words of their speeches; extremely beautiful imagery and helped us present people’s passion and interest in the election in a different way to we were used to seeing on CNN.44 King also points to the outpouring of emotion following the death of Michael Jackson. People opened up their photo albums and used iReport to share pictures of the moments they had spent with Jackson or how his music had influenced their lives. She says these personal testimonies helped paint an entirely new kind of obituary for CNN. Another key development for CNN has been the engagement with social networks like Twitter. It was used extensively during the US election and the cable channel has incorporated its use directly into its marketing (see 42 Other US networks have similar initiatives including ABC’s i-Caught, Fox’s uReport and MSNBC’s FirstPerson. 43 250,000 submissions since Feb. 2008, 16,000 approved for CNN. 93% growth June 2008–2009 44 Author interview with Lila King, July 2009. 20 Figure 9). Early adoption by anchors like Rick Sanchez, supported by heavy on-air integration, helped Twitter go mainstream in the United States during the autumn of 2008. Sanchez in particular has become an excellent brand ambassador for CNN in social media circles with thousands of fans and followers on Twitter, Facebook and You Tube. One of the driving motivations at CNN has been the desire to engage audiences in new ways, but there is no high-profile social media editor. CNN views social media as ‘everyone’s job’, and have engaged staff members across the organisation with training and awareness programmes to arm them with the tools to be successful in the digital age. Figure 9. CNN has contributed to the widespread adoption of Twitter and Facebook in the USA. The crowdsourcing of questions for major world leaders and debates has been a strong strain in CNN’s news coverage for many years but in the 2008 election the network moved beyond email to stage the first YouTube/CNN debates with presidential candidates. For CNN, the debates offered a chance to tap into the popular mood and change the formulaic nature of these events. For YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley the use of audience-generated video questions changed the nature of the debate: ‘We are bringing a level of authenticity to politics, and it is bringing transparency and access to voters in a new way.’45 For social media theorists and academics however, the debates created a storm of criticism over the choice of gimmicky videos;46 and a perception that CNN was paying little more than lip service to genuine engagement and discussion. The debate did allow questions to be put on subjects like gays and lesbians in the military, health care and Iraq, in a more direct and authentic way than would have been possible for a moderator, and yet Rod Carveth, an associate professor at Marywood University, says that the CNN's old media role limited how much new ground the debate could break: 45 http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19990458 7 June 2007. 46 Including a person singing asking for a pardon for a parking ticket and a snowman asking about global warming. 23 audiences. Newspapers tend to be more interested in engaging audiences over a wider range of non-UGC material in a way that can drive revenue. 3. Social media started in most organisations as a series of bottom–up experiments, but these are now being complemented with top–down initiatives and the allocation of specific roles to coordinate activity (for example the appointment of social media editors, Twitter correspondents, evangelists). 4. All those surveyed believe social media are valuable as a potential driver of new reach and most have specifically hired or allocated marketing or business development roles to maximise the potential of social networks. 5. All those surveyed recognise the dilemmas involved in blurring the lines between professional and user content in this space. They are all extending and developing existing guidelines and/or developing training programmes for social media. . 24 3. Changing coverage This chapter explores how social media are influencing the way news is reported through two examples: the G20 protests (April 2009) and Iranian street protests (June 2009). 3.1 Iranian election protests, June 2009 The aftermath of the Iranian elections in June 2009 provided further compelling evidence of the power of user-generated footage, but it also highlighted a battle of wills between a government determined to restrict access to information, and an alliance of newspapers, broadcasters and Iranian citizens equally determined to use new technology to get the story out. Figure 11. The so called Twitter revolution as seen by cartoonist Mike Luckovich Used with the permission of Mike Luckovich and Creators Syndicate. All rights refused. As in previous cases of so-called citizen journalism, it was mobile phones and other digital cameras that captured sometimes bloody street protests against election results, which the opposition said were rigged. Dramatic footage from all over the country was uploaded to video-sharing and social media sites, as well as to mainstream media organisations like CNN and the BBC, which at one stage was receiving up to five videos a minute. For YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin, his site had become a critical platform for citizen journalism: ‘Iranian citizens are having their voices heard, their faces seen and their story gets told around the world without filtering.’ But it wasn’t just the scale of upload, it was the speed of distribution and way in which social media sites fed and drove the agenda which really marked out this story. 25 Figure 12. Photographs and videos uploaded to CNNs’ iReport Much of this activity focused on Twitter, where #Iranelections49 became the central aggregation point for those hungry for news and for those wishing to distribute new pictures or information. During the first week of the protest, a large proportion of outgoing links from Twitter and 60 per cent of all links from blogs were on the subject of Iran, according to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a group that monitors news coverage.50 In their analysis they found that whilst many of these links started off linking to citizen-generated video, they soon moved to a wider range of issues and concerns. There was extensive linking to commentary in the mainstream media, particularly to reports about the role of social media. And the role of technology was also a major theme, with links to articles such as ‘cyberwar for beginners’51 aimed at telling users in Iran about how to get round internet censorship by setting up proxy servers and how to protect the identity of protesters from the authorities. An interesting subtext of this story was the difficulties the authorities had in shutting down the flows of information. The government of Iran has one of the most sophisticated and extensive technical filtering systems in the world.52 The Revolutionary Guard plays an active role in enforcing internet content standards and during the election campaign they had experimented with the blocking of Facebook, which was being widely used by political 49 A hashtag (#) is the convention denoted by the Twitter community as a way of pull ing together tweets related to a particular subject. 50 ‘Iran and the Twitter revolution’: PEJ, June 2009 (http://www.journalism.org/index_report/iran_and_%E2%80%9Ctwitter_revolution%E2 %80%9D) 51 Article by a Scandinavian blogger based in Wales had huge influence being re-tweeted over 1,000 times and being reprinted on other blogs (http://reinikainen.co.uk/2009/06/iranelection-cyberwar-guide-for-beginners). 52 Iran country report, Opennet initiative, June 2009 (http://opennet.net/research/profi les/iran). 28 From the Mousavi perspective this was sometimes seen as a straightforward and legitimate tactic; a corrective for a perceived lack of balance in the coverage within Iran. This tweet from a Mousavi supporter was typical: We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection.58 Such grass-roots involvement was supported by more party-based activity. One feed, mousavi1388,59 was filled with exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Facebook page had over 100,000 members and included regular polls and links to videos and photographs of street protests. Figure 14. Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Facebook page announces ‘You are the Media, we are one!’ The mainstream media in its coverage took a mainly pragmatic approach to these issues. They felt outflanked in terms of speed, previously an area many had built their brands around, but all felt uncomfortable running unverified reports and made every attempt to find corroboration before publication or broadcast. Lila King, the executive in charge of CNN’s iReport, said staff members tried to ‘triangulate the details’ of an event by corroborating stories with other contributors in a given area. CNN also employed Farsi speakers to listen to the chants of protest videos or identify locations in Tehran.60 Where they couldn’t be sure about the facts, but felt the pictures had the ring of truth, they labelled the pictures accordingly. In total CNN received almost 6,000 Iran-related submissions and approved just over 200 for use on television. The New York Times, the Guardian, CNN and the Huffington Post made the information emerging from social networks a central part of their coverage, allocating specific resources to provide a filtered take of the activity on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. On the web, this technique is known as ‘live blogging’ or ‘live text commentary’, whilst on TV it involves allocating a social media correspondent to monitor and report directly on activity (see Figures 15 and 16). At the Guardian, Matthew Weaver spent ten days 58 Tweet authenticated and published by the New York Times, June 2009. 59 1388 is the year in the Persian calendar. 60 Author interview with Lila King, June 2009. 29 blogging the events. When rallies and conflicts occur, ‘first the tweets come, then the pictures, then the video and then the wires’, he said. ‘What people are saying at one point in the day is then confirmed by more conventional sources four or five hours later.’61 This activity caught the imagination of the White House, which controversially arranged for Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney to ask a question at President Obama’s regular press conference. The question, asked on behalf of the people of Iran, was chosen by Pitney from a long list of crowdsourced questions from social media sources – the first time this has ever happened. Figure 15. The Lede Blog at NYT.com kept a running commentary on events. Figure 16. CNN’s Josh Levs in the role of Twitter correspondent (June 2009). By engaging in this activity, mainstream organisations saw a number of direct benefits during the Iran crisis: 61 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/business/media/29coverage.html 30 1. Extended newsgathering possibilities mainly pictures, but also including leads on stories, usually through live blog reporters engaging directly with networks. 2. A single copy-tasting function for social web activity, saving time elsewhere in the organisation and reduced scope for mistakes. 3. An accumulation of credit within communities like Twitter, including a significant number of links back to their websites or broadcasts These benefits were demonstrated when shocking footage emerged of the death on camera of teenager Neda Agha-Soltan, an apparently innocent bystander to the protests. The footage was identified and edited/sanitised to make it suitable for a mainstream audience. Although verification was difficult, the pictures were published/broadcast with appropriate caveats. Finally, the journalists used crowdsourcing techniques, and their credit within networks like Twitter, to find out more about Neda and her background. Robert Mackey who writes the Lede Blog for the New York Times interviewed correspondents and contacts in Iran to build up a picture, which made it into the main paper and a separate item on New York Times TV.62 In turn, these follow-up items were heavily recommended via links on Twitter, where a separate #neda tag was set up. Despite headlines about how Iran had become the first Twitter revolution, there is little evidence (as in Moldova63 and G20) that it was used as a primary tool for organising protests. Twitter was mainly used to share information around the world, to link to and highlight mainstream media reports and user-generated content. In a sense, Twitter became the real-time glue for highlighting and filtering all of the activity on other websites and social networks. Andrew Keen, author of the critical book Cult of the Amateur says the lesson of the Iranian elections is that: Twitter is a great real-time tool for distributing opinion, but it is no replacement for curated media coverage of the crisis.64 Indeed, it remains the case that most people still saw the protests through the lens of the mainstream media, either via the websites of major news organisations or particularly via TV bulletins.65 Nevertheless, it is significant that, as the PEJ has demonstrated, the social media elements were so prominent and so vital for effective storytelling. Mark Jones, Head of Communities for Reuters, says that stories like Iran demonstrate that the role of a traditional news organisation in a breaking story is changing significantly: Our job now is packaging raw feeds from many sources and filtering it to provide audience big enough to make a difference. It is all becoming much 62 A young woman’s fate resonates (http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/06/22/world/1194841118796/woman-s-death-a- symbol-of- iran-s-crisis.html?hp). 63 Twitter was reported to have played a role in organising mass protests against the results of Moldovan elections in April 2009, even though the network had only a tiny number of active users in the country. 64 http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Iran-Election-Coverage-On-Twitter- Socia l-Media-Becomes-Vita l-Tool-For-Iranian-Citizens/Article/200906315307209? 65 BBC 10 o’clock news averaged over 5m viewers in the week 12–20 June. The BBC website a lso saw increases in traff ic with average daily user counts of 5m during the same period. 33 technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones on his blog.73 Stripping away the hype and the fog of battle, the conclusion seemed to be that Twitter was mainly used in broadcast mode, often just relaying messages from the mainstream media itself. It proved pretty ineffective as a tool for discussion, communication or as a way of organising protesters. This seemed to have happened via text messages, face to face meetings and the old-fashioned megaphone. And as the following tweet demonstrates, we should not underestimate the practical difficulties in getting phone, and especially data signals, out of a crowded area: ‘Mobile coverage v bad prob due to number of anarchists also using iPhones’. The second crucial aspect of the G20 media story was how a video shot by a bystander exposed apparently incomplete police explanations about the death of Ian Tomlinson. The video was made public, not directly on YouTube, but through a traditional newspaper, the Guardian. Steve Busfield, Head of Media and Technology coverage, says that the story saw the light of day through a mix of old and new media techniques: Paul Lewis, the reporter who got the story, spent a long time chasing it down, trying to find people who were there. There was a lot of footwork involved … and yet the footage comes from the new era of citizen journalism where someone in the street with phone or camera can happen to catch the crucial moment for the story.74 The G20 has thrown up more evidence about how user generated activities complement – rather than replace – the mainstream media. In this case, the Guardian’s traditional reporters were able to follow the story through, as well as provide the necessary mass audience to force a change of tack. But it is also interesting to note that Guardian was chosen to receive the video partly because they were already active in new citizen networks.75 More widely, this story seems to have turned George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a Big Brother society on its head. Now it is ‘us watching them’. Author and journalist Nik Gowing argues that new information technologies and dynamics are together driving a new wave of democratisation and accountability:76 The core implications are twofold. First, this new technical reality has dramatically foreshortened the news and information cycle from a few hours to often no more than a few minutes. Second, those cellphones and digital cameras of the proliferation of new ‘information doers’ have swiftly modified and broadened the assumed definitions of the media landscape in a crisis. The new, ubiquitous transparency they create, sheds light where it is often assumed officially there will be darkness. The lessons from the coverage of the G20 and the Iranian street protests are being examined by authorities, media organisations and by journalism schools. All of the actors are reassessing how they need to respond to the 73 Rory Cellan Jones, ‘Do Anarchists Tweet?’ BBC website, 2 April 2009 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/04/do_anarchists_tweet.html). 74 Guardian Media Talk Podcast: April 2009. 75 Author interviews with Guardian employees, June 2009. 76 Nik Gowing, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans (Reuters Institute, 2009). 34 shortening news cycle; how they can filter and authenticate more quickly the growing range of perspectives and sources; how they can influence events before they get pushed around by them. As Nik Gowing says: Too often, the knee-jerk institutional response continues to be one of denial as if this new broader, fragmented, redefined media landscape does not exist. Institutional assumptions of commanding the information high ground in a crisis are from a different era. But if, as Nik Gowing suggests, the instant scrutiny created by the new digital landscape can make or break reputations at breathtaking speed, the responsibilities of traditional media organisations will be more acute than ever. And that will require new skills and training in social media techniques as well as great judgement about when and how to reflect the information and conversation that is swirling around a story. Go too fast, and you risk undermining the credibility and trust of the brand, too slow, and you risk being left behind. For mainstream news organisations, both these stories have shown that a new grammar is emerging of real-time news coverage – one which involves and reflects the work of bystanders with cameras, as well as drawing on professional news staff using microblogging tools. As the BBC, the Guardian and others draw up new guidelines for covering these type of events in the future, they stress this will appear alongside traditional analysis and provision of relevant background and context. This may be an alternative source of real-time news, but it will not replace rolling TV, or the proper considered analysis of an event, once the dust has settled. It is perhaps best to think of social media as a supplementary dimension to the coverage of real- time events. The direction of travel may be clear but the destination remains uncertain. 35 4. Changing journalistic practices This chapter explores how social media tools and the growth of participation have affected the work of two journalists, at different stages of their careers, followed by a wider discussion about the impact on journalistic workflow. 4.1 BBC Business Editor Robert Peston Robert Peston is the UK’s most read blogger.77 Regular updates from the former Financial Times journalist have become required reading during the current economic crisis. Indeed, the postings on his blog document the key moments in the collapse and subsequent rescue of the banking system over a two and a half year period. In most cases, such as the demise of Northern Rock, the pages of ‘Peston’s Picks’ are where the stories have been broken. The blog was so successful that Peston was hauled up in front of a House of Commons select committee to explain the extraordinary influence of his reporting. And yet Robert Peston’s blog had humble beginnings, as a low-key email for internal communication, aimed at giving BBC staff ‘more of a feeling for the language of business’. Even when it was launched to the public as a blog in January 2007, Peston had a dual purpose: • to disseminate scoops, facts and ideas throughout the BBC, to inform output; • to continue the work started by Jeff Randall,78 to make the BBC the ‘first resort’ for people interested in business It is clear that Peston primarily views his blog in a fairly traditional way, as another way of distributing content: If you are an investigating journalist, as I have been for 25 years, you always find out more stuff than you can get into your broadcasts. Your ability to put out ideas, facts, scoops that won’t quite work on bulletins or TV and radio is fantastic – because I feel I am making more use of the stuff I’ve found out.79 But the blog has also had a number of other benefits, which speak more to the value of social media as a way of gathering better stories in the first place. He says it has established his credentials as a repository for the information that matters: One of the things that helps you as a journalist is that you are seen as an authority on a particular subject, because if you are seen as an authority then people will come to you with ideas. And one of the ways that helps you become an authority and take ownership of a story is if you are doing more than the big exciting story but also doing the nitty gritty. 77 There were 5–6 mill ion unique users per week at the height of the financial crisis. Individual blog posts could receive up to 1 mill ion page views per day. BBC server logs acquired June 2009. 78 Jeff Randall, respected newspaper journalist, brought to the BBC after criticism of its business coverage. 79 Author interview with Peston, May 2009. 38 largest journalistic employer, is moving from a bulletin-led model to a correspondent- led model.’83 This trend towards the star correspondent may not be completely new, but social media are exacerbating a tendency highlighted by Andrew Currah84 to reward journalists for their personal ‘clickstream’ activity, rather than their contribution to the wider brand values. At the very least, a huge personal Twitter or Facebook following could increase the individual journalist’s bargaining capacity over pay or bring the journalist to the attention of another publication. The way in which personal brands work in this space is an increasing issue for many news organisations. Should all journalists be represented in this way, or just a selected few? How should these new demands be balanced with other commitments? The more informal nature of interaction, the always-on nature of these tools, and the frequent blurring of personal and professional content has led the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, amongst others, to draw up guidelines that place limits around their journalist’s activity. BBC Director General Mark Thompson says that BBC journalists who are ‘of interest to the public at large, because of the name and the title they've got’, have to consider their use of social media carefully: There isn't really a Chinese Wall you can draw between personal opinion and what appears on the BBC – the same thing with the blogs and the tweets. What you can't do easily is take off the cloak of the BBC and put it back on at will.85 The BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones is acutely aware of these dilemmas. As one of the corporation’s most high-profile bloggers and tweeters, he posts pictures and information about his dogs and children, alongside thoughtful opinion pieces and breaking news on technology. He says it is important to be aware of the dangers, but journalists need to understand it and to dip their toes in the water. For Cellan-Jones one of the key benefits of social media has been to help give a new status to specialist journalists, who would often struggle to get airtime under the old broadcast model: In Television for years you could only do the big stories. If there was a development in Lloyds TSB, you would go to the Editor of the 10 (o’clock news) and they would say sorry, but it is a bit obscure. A blog is place to satisfy your professional pride in between the big stories.86 A key challenge for many news organisations is to encourage more journalists to engage with these tools, and to use them for making contacts, for crowdsourcing and as a channel for their reporting. The BBC and the Guardian have embarked on, or have completed, training courses to raise awareness amongst all their journalists. The Guardian also relies on evangelists like Kevin Anderson, who try out new techniques and work with journalists over time to make the change: 83 Emily Bell lecture to media students, Falmouth, May 2009 (http://publicserviceblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/lecture-to-fa lmouth). 84 Andrew Currah, What’s Happening to our News (Reuters Institute, 2009). 85 Mark Thompson, speech at Charles Wheeler Memorial Lecture, June 2009 (http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/534512.php). 86 Author interview with Rory Cellan-Jones, May 2009. 39 The challenge for me is that there always has to be an editorial justification for this … just to use shiny tools is not enough, it has to allow us to enhance the journalism, to do something that we couldn’t have done before.87 For the New York Times a key part of their strategy has been to target high- profile journalists and offer them support and encouragement. Soraya Durabi, who has worked with Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Nick Kristof, says the key is to find journalists with the right mindset: There is a reason why somebody like Nick (Kristof) has hundreds of thousands of followers on these platforms. It is because he has a knack for it and the journalistic instinct to use them correctly. I think it is a mistake if you just give a blanket tutorial to your whole Newsroom and say this is Twitter this is how you should use it. That is a mistake.88 In practice, visible and consistent use of social media by senior correspondents has been one of the most effective ways of driving change in companies like the New York Times and CNN. Rather than seeing it as a time- consuming add-on, the most successful practitioners have built social media into their journalistic workflows – and made it work for them. Social media has opened up new opportunities for some to widen the impact of their journalism; for others, it is making the sourcing of information and contacts easier and quicker. But so far at least, the use of new tools has not led to any fundamental rewrite of the rule book – just a few tweaks round the edges. As with so many aspects of the internet, social media are providing a useful extra layer of functionality, enabling stories to be told in new ways, not changing the heart of what journalists do. ‘Same values, new tools’, sums up the core thinking in most newsrooms. 87 Author interview with Kevin Anderson, June 2009. 88 Author interview with Soraya Durabi, June 2009. 40 5. The role and importance of social media networks 5.1 Popularity and usage Social networks are not just useful tools for journalists, they are also powerful new aggregators and distribution networks, which threaten to further disrupt the already uncertain economics of the internet. The ‘click and link economy’ has tended to work against traditional publishers, disaggregating content and allowing search engines and web portals to take a significant slice of the available revenues. Now, social networks like Facebook are becoming the portals of the twenty-first century: a key starting point for web journeys and a place where audiences are spending more and more time. The 2009 Internet in Britain report89 confirmed the extraordinary rise in popularity of social networking in the last few years; 49 per cent of internet users had created or updated a social networking profile, compared with just 17 per cent two years before. And this is a global phenomenon; Facebook has come from nowhere to become the world’s second most popular website90 after Google. Only a year ago, it had fewer users than a global news website like CNN. Today, it dwarfs CNN on the web, by 12–16 times (see Figure 18). Figure 18. Global reach, Facebook vs. CNN Sept. 2008–May 2009. Source: Alexa Research accesses via www.alexa.com (June 2009). But the growth in popularity of social networks – and the resultant broadening audience – is only half the story. Social networks also outperform news sites in terms of engagement. Almost 20 per cent of all time spent on the internet is now spent on one of these sites.91 Average daily time spent on Facebook is 25 minutes, compared with around 5 minutes for a popular news site (Figure 19). 89 Will iam Dutton, Ellen Helsper and Monica Gerber, Internet in Britain 2009 (Oxford Internet Institute, 2009). 90 Hitwise top 20 websites (http://www.hitwise.co.uk). 91 Nielsen research shows one in six UK minutes (17%) spent with these sites, 10% globally (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/nielsen-news/social-networking-new-global- footprint). 43 5.2 Changing nature of recommendation ‘He’s dead. It’s all over Facebook’, was how the news of Michael Jackson’s death (June 2009) was broken in the home of the author of this report. Another social networker wrote: ‘I don’t recall where I was when Buddy Holly died. But I’ll recall where I was when Michael Jackson died. I was on Twitter.’94 As we’ve seen in the case studies in Chapter 3, social networks are increasingly where news is broken, sometimes running hours ahead of traditional news organisations. Although most social networks did not start out with this intention, the sharing of news and information has become an increasingly important part of the mix. On Twitter 30 per cent of all the conversations related to Michael Jackson in the hours following his death; 15 per cent of conversations related to Iran a week earlier. Figure 23. Hourly tweets containing words Michael Jackson June 2009. Source: http://twist.f laptor.com/ Overall, the combination of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and others is beginning to provide an alternative source of traffic to Google. The Telegraph says that 8 per cent of its traffic now comes from links sent around in social networking sites,95 the BBC figure is smaller but has grown by 150 per cent in nine months in the UK (September 2008–June 2009), with Facebook making the biggest contribution. The Guardian says that its technology section now gets more referrals from Twitter than from Google News. But these figures almost certainly under-report the true impact of these networks, because updates from mobile phones and widely used special Twitter desktop clients do not show up in log reports. There are three key reasons for the growth of news and information in social networks: 1. Facebook created a news and activity feed in September 2006, which has become a default setting on a user’s homepage. This has encouraged more linking to mainstream news sites. It has since made it easier to include links and recommendations from other news- related sites. 2. Mainstream audiences are now using social networks and they have brought their interests and preoccupations, including the sharing of 94 Twitterer ‘toomarvelous’ quoted in New York Times (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/michael-jackson-tops-the-charts-on-twitter). 95 http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/telegraph-traff icsocia l-sites/ and author interview with Julian Sambles. 44 news. Facebook’s dramatic growth in global audience (December 2007–December 2008) came from people aged 35-49. 3. Websites have provided icons or buttons to allow easy sharing and linking and otherwise promoted social networks (Figure 24). Audio video integration with YouTube has proved a huge boon because of the younger demographic; now news sites are doing the same. Figure 24. Socia l bookmark l inks at the bottom of BBC News stories. Newspapers and media companies have started to establish specialist marketing groups to exploit and monitor the impact of content in these spaces. The Telegraph has focused its efforts on targeting specific networks, notably Digg, with which it has a close relationship and very high return click- throughs. The New York Times has set up a ‘Buzz’ marketing department96 which pays particular attention to the different social networks and the different audiences they could attract. The New York Times says that, month by month, referrals are increasing so steadily and so significantly that they are impossible to ignore. Now, the New York Times is developing applications, contests and fan pages for key correspondents97 throughout the social web, selecting different content for each platform to attract the right demographic. Figure 25. Nick Kristof Fan page on You Tube. To understand the impact of these networks further, I worked with BBC Click, a weekly television programme on technology, which airs on the BBC News channel in the UK and also on BBC World TV. Click has over 1 million followers on Twitter, a function of being one of the default choices when users initially sign up to the service. Each week, the staff at BBC Click post a number of tweets, along with links to stories on their own website or useful resources elsewhere. 96 The idea of Buzz or vira l marketing emerged from Yahoo in the 1990s. 97 Nick Kristof offered a prize to a young journalist to travel with him to Africa, where the winner made videos for his YouTube channel. 45 Sometimes these tweets are picked up and passed on (re-tweeted) by others, creating a network effect. Figure 26 shows the path around the world of one tweet highlighting a story on speech recognition. The tweet was passed on (re-tweeted) nine times through four continents and a small percentage of followers in each network clicked on the link to the full story. The result was 4,012 additional click-throughs to the Click Online website, 33 per cent of the total page views (12,000) for this story.98 Figure 26. The path of one tweet from BBC Click Online. As this example demonstrates, Twitter can produce dramatic results as a viral marketing channel, but it is not yet clear that this success can be replicated outside the technology genre. Research suggests that traditional news publishers who pump out generic news feeds tend to have low click-through rates. Robin Goad, UK Director of audience specialist Hitwise says that, where journalists are authentically engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success: Automated feeds get most followers but least click throughs. They tend to spit out three or four stories at a time and look a bit like spam. On the other hand if you have specific journalists, who are asking questions, retweeting, forwarding links, engaging properly, they will get much higher click through rate because they will be seen as a trusted source.99 Hitwise research indicates that if you follow this approach, you can get click- through rates of up to 10 per cent. For an account with 5,000 followers, you might expect to get 200 click-throughs from your standard followers and perhaps 500 if you can trigger re-tweets. 98 It was re-tweeted by amongst others a communications expert in New York, an entrepreneur in Niagara Falls, a speech recognition company in Cambridge, an Indian software engineer, a Iranian with a network of contacts across the Middle East and Aberystwyth Online, a hub for information about socia l networking and technology based in Wales. 99 Author interview with Robin Goad, UK research director Hitwise (July 2009). 48 more effectively.102 We are already seeing networks linking together with initiatives like Google Friend Connect, Open ID and Facebook Connect.103 Figure 28 shows the start of this process with an Obama press conference hosted on Facebook, but advertised on Twitter, and for many people the click-through would have been seamless, with no further login required. 10,000 people clicked the link within seconds were able to participate in a global conversation, as well as talk privately with their existing friends and contacts. Figure 28. Obama press conference uses twitter to get an audience for a Facebook-hosted event. Interoperability clearly brings benefits to audiences, but it raises deeply contentious issues over who should own an individual’s online identity and, by implication, who should be able to profit from the information that surrounds this. If identity is too tied into a particular system (like Facebook or Google) there is a fear that this will give them too much power and influence. Many news providers would feel more comfortable with an open identity system like Open ID, which allows individuals to control all aspects of their own data and has been designed ‘not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business’.104 Some mainstream organisations like the New York 102 This effect is known as Metcalf’s law, which states that the ‘value’ or ‘power’ of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network (http://www-ec.njit.edu/~robertso/infosci/metcalf.h tml). 103 An initiative to al low any other website to link in with Facebook’s publicly avai lable profile information and other services. 104 Open ID UK website (http://www.openid.co.uk). 49 Times and the BBC are also experimenting with their own social networks,105 as a way of keeping some control of user experience and the interface with a growing number of networks. Related to this is the economic viability and ownership of the social networking services themselves. Until now, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have found it difficult to monetise their considerable traffic. Audiences have become used to getting these services for free and until recently advertisers showed a preference for working with traditional media brands, rather than risk juxtaposing their trusted clients with questionable user-generated content. Facebook lost advertisers in the UK in August 2007 when they found their advertisements (Vodafone, eBay and First Direct amongst others) running on a Facebook group page dedicated to the right-wing British National party.106 A further setback came when they had to withdraw behaviourally targeted advertisements after user protest over privacy concerns.107 Despite these setbacks, social networks are coming under intense pressure to find new revenue streams. They have success with their audiences, but almost all networks are running at a huge loss. With current business models unsustainable, the outlook remains volatile, and analysts believe social networks will move away from advertising and try to use the data they collect to help brands better target users. Twitter founder Biz Stone recently confirmed this direction, when talking about premium services for brands. Whilst audiences are likely to continue to get social networking for free, mainstream organisations will need to be careful not to become too dependent on services which may end up costing money in the future. Over the past decade, news organisations have seen their content disaggregated, and a significant proportion of the value taken away by Google, which has become a key gateway to mainstream news content. Now history may be about to repeat itself, with social networks reinforcing the trend towards disaggregation and putting further pressure on the funding of journalism in traditional news organisations. 105 Times People launched 2008. BBC Spaces due to launch in 2009. 106 ‘Facebook Stink over Ad Placement’, Media Life Magazine, Aug. 2007 (http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman2/publish/New_media_23/Big_Facebook_s tink_over_ad_placement.asp). 107 ‘Rough Seas Nearly Sink Facebook’, CNET (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3- 9826664-36.html). 50 6. Conclusion It is clear from the interviews for this study that social media and user- generated content is increasingly moving centre stage; influencing the strategic direction and practice of journalism – at least for the five publishers studied here. It is possible to see three distinct phases in the development of community and participation on mainstream websites: (1) the emergence of message boards and community-building (from 1995); (2) blogging (from 2001); (3) the rise of social media and social networks (from 2006). None of these have replaced the previous incarnations, which have continued to evolve in their own right. But in total, we are seeing an unprecedented growth in the amount of participation on mainstream websites, allied to an explosion in self-expression on third-party sites.108 This activity is proving to be a useful extra layer of activity, which is opening up new possibilities for storytelling as journalism evolves. But the evidence in this report backs a growing consensus that citizen journalism and the networks that make up the ‘Fifth Estate’109 are not going to replace mainstream media, but will be complementary to it. A few years ago, discussions raged about whether you could trust new media, and whether they would destroy old journalism. Now the debate has become more practical and more constructive, says Charlie Beckett,110 formerly a journalist, now an author and academic: ‘I think we’ve emerged out of that rather boring zero sum game and realised that it is inevitable and it is not a choice.’ Making a similar point, Tom Armitage coined the term ‘next media’,111 as a way of bridging the sterile debate about new and old media. He applauds the extra diversity and fresh voices on the web, but says they are not to be feared: Blogs were never competition for conventional publishing: they were an adjunct to it. Blogging gave a printing press to anyone who wanted one; what the bloggers did with their presses – whether it was emulate journalism or something else entirely – was up to them. Conventional publishing companies have begun to realise this over the past 12 months. Each party is beginning to understand its place in a complex new eco-system of news and information. The Fifth Estate is now providing a range of expression that didn’t exist before and can discuss stories that news organisations have traditionally found hard to cover. The mainstream media monitors a wide range of sources, including those from the Fifth Estate. But as the timeline of breaking news is compressed, it can be argued that there is an even greater need for traditional journalistic skills of sorting fact from fiction; selecting the key facts for a mass audience. Blogger Guido Fawkes gave his scoop (on Damian McBride’s email indiscretions) to the Daily Telegraph because he recognised this was the best 108 Socia l networking and UGC fastest growing sector in last two years: Dutton et al., Internet in Britain. 109 Fifth Estate describes networked individuals and semi-professional groups that wil l l ive a longside traditional media. Will iam H. Dutton, Through the Network of Networks: The Fifth Estate (Oxford Internet Institute, 2007). 110 Author interview with Charlie Beckett, Director of Polis, forum for research and debate into journalism at LSE, June 2009. 111 Tom Armitage, ‘2007 and the "Next" Big Media Thing’, New Statesman, July 2006 (http://www.newstatesman.com/200607310067). 53 Bibliography Tom Armitage (2006) ‘2007 and the "Next" Big Media Thing’, New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/200607310067). Charlie Beckett, Supermedia: Saving Journalism so it can Save the World (Blackwell, 2008) Emily Bell, ‘Lecture to Falmouth’, blog, 8 May 2009, (http://publicserviceblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/lecture-to-falmouth) Patrick Butler, Ted W. Hall, Alistair M. Hanna et al., A Revolution in Interaction (McKinsey Quarterly, 1997). Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008) Andrew Currah, What’s Happening to our News: An Investigation into the Likely Impact of the Digital Revolution on the Economics of News Publishing (Challenges Paper; Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2009) Nick Davies, Flat Earth News (Chatto & Windus, 2008) William H. Dutton, Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 1999) –––– Through the Network of Networks: The Fifth Estate (Oxford Internet Institute, 2007) –––– Ellen Helsper and Monica Gerber, Internet in Britain 2009 (Oxford Internet Institute, 2009) Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media, 2004) Nik Gowing, Skyful of Lies and Black Swans (Challenges Paper; Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2009). 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Owyang (2009) The Future of the Social Web (Forrester Research, 2009) (http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,46970,00.h tml) Alan Rusbridger, ‘Future of Journalism’, Institut für Medienpolitik in Berlin, 2009 (http://vimeo.com/4359127) Paul Saffo, ‘Farewell Information, it’s a Media Age’, 2007 (http://www.saffo.com/essays/essay_farewellinfo.pdf). Clay Shirky, ‘How Social Media can Make History’, TED conference address, 2009 (http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_ can_make_history.html). 54 Mark Tremayne, ‘Harnessing the Active Audience: Synthesising Blog Research and Lessons for the Future of Media’, in Mark Tremayne (ed.), Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media (Routledge, 2007) Claire Wardle and Andrew Williams, UGC@theBBC: Understanding its Impact upon Contributors, Non-Contributors and BBC News (Cardiff University, 2009) 55 Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to all those who helped with this study, which was conducted in ten weeks or so in the summer of 2009. The topicality of the subject (particularly the emerging story of Iran) forced frequent rethinks of structure and focus and I am would like to thank my academic supervisors for their guidance and support. In particular I’d like to thank Bill Dutton at the Oxford Internet Institute for his suggestions and ideas and the staff at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, John Lloyd, James Painter and David Levy, for their consistent advice and encouragement. Thanks also to visiting fellows Andrew Currah, Robert Picard and Juan Señor, who helped to broaden my thinking. This study would not have been possible without the open participation of five of the world’s largest mainstream media organisations. I was delighted at the generosity with which senior executives and busy practitioners gave their time and insights. I am also indebted to academics and commentators, who were also hugely generous with their time and supportive of the enterprise as a whole. I would like to thank the BBC for continuing to encourage programmes such as the Reuters fellowship and allowing me space and time to develop detailed thinking in this area. And last, but not least, a heartfelt thank you to my wife Tamsin and the rest of the family for putting up with my long absences, preoccupied behaviour and overuse of 140 character communication.