10 years on Twitter, 10 lessons about social media and journalism
In the summer of 2009 I opened a Twitter account and did not imagine for a moment how that new application was going to turn my television journalist’s life upside down. It was the starting point of a a path full of opportunities and challenges.
48,700 tweets later, I am another journalist. I quit my job in the news service of a conventional television network. I stopped making reports and live connections. Rather, I unknowingly transformed all that experience to adapt it to a new environment. The information was there, summarized, the chronicles live too, emerging tweets to tweets from the guts of my Blackberry, Iphone or Ipad. On Twitter, also on Facebook.
These are ten lessons that I’ve learned all those years.
1. Our resistance to training makes us use social networks at a very small percentage of their possibilities, both for narration, obtaining sources or data as well as for verification and the journalistic business.
2. The social media toolkit for a journalist includes: mobile journalism, Twitter lists, verification tools and listening and dialogue techniques.
3. The journalist’s pedestal has broken. Covering an event in real time from a social network allows a close relationship with people who expect responsibility and rigor from you while informing them on their mobile phones. The dialogue is non stop: messages of encouragement, additional data, objections, corrections, thanks. There is no pedestal for the journalist. Thus the community is forged, in a simpler and healthier relationship.
4. Working with native content and formats for social networks is not giving away the content but the best way to generate new communities of readers and new monetization environments for the media.
5 . Order and context. We do this when we’re editing a newspaper, a news website, by developing a radio and television newsletter: sort the information and provide context. If journalism has a future in a chaotic universe like that of networks, this is the way.
6. What a great mistake if fact checking work was relegated to specialized media or small teams.
7. The best social media team in history will be the one that does not exist. That will mean that the work of this has been internalized by all members of the editorial staff (and other departments)
8. Telling news on social networks when you are a journalist is always better than commenting on them.
9. The credibility of journalism is directly proportional to the ability of professionals not to jump in all the ideological and polarized discussions promoted by politicians and parties in social networks.
10. Journalism has never been so necessary nor has it been so threatened by planetary and sophisticated disinformation operations. It will be difficult to live up to this challenge for democracies. Let’s try, at least, with all the weapons.
