Journalism Today: Social Media, Crowdfunding and More November 25th, 2009
Tom Amontree

Thanks to the Internet, breaking news is now rapidly delivered to our smart phones, via Twitter, through online news sources, and in blogs.  Digital media has become a natural extension of the print world, and as this transformation has occurred, so too have the habits of journalists and the trends shaping journalism itself.

Take Twitter, for instance.  Beyond personal brand building, journalists are now using the 140-character microblogging tool to communicate stories, collaborate on ideas (a.k.a. “crowdsourcing”), and find the interviews that make a general idea highly specific and personal.  For example, one local news reporter hosts a segment called “Good Question” that invites his Twitter followers to respond to a question he posts by inviting them to share angles, opinions, and relevant life experience.  The exercise has led to invaluable ideas and interviews that would have been difficult to identify otherwise.

Journalists can also stay on top of breaking news stories.  Twitterfall is a useful tool that some media outlets are now using to monitor the latest news stories – enabling users to track trending topics and customize the results based on theme and geography.  Journalists also rely on tools such as DailyRT and TweetMeme to see the top retweeted microblogs on Twitter.  And for those who want to use Twitter to share breaking news, a Twittermail e-mail interface enables journalists to stream a series of tweets to a news website.

But the collaborative nature of online journalism is perhaps best displayed by a new trend recently showcased in the New York Times in Lindsey Howshaw’s piece, “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash.”  Crowdfunding, or community-funded journalism through sites such as Spot.Us, provided the capital driving this story’s development and its high-profile placement gives credence to this new journalism model.  With shrinking budgets at some of the nation’s leading publications, crowdfunding represents a powerful option to ensure meaningful stories are told.

With broadband-powered technologies revolutionizing the way journalists find and communicate stories, readers everywhere will continue to benefit from dynamic reporting and breaking news that reaches them virtually in real time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under Benefits of Broadband. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.