Haiti: Social media failure?

In last week’s post, I pondered the possibility of a new media takeover.

Typically, however, that same day I came across a particularly persuasive editorial column that debunked my prior musings entirely.

Joshua Keating’s article in Foreign Policy marks a personal moment of realization that perhaps social media is not the saviour the journalistic profession has been waiting for. Oh great.

In the article, Keating deflated the hype surrounding the social media coverage of the ongoing Haiti crisis.

While Keating praised the micro-blogging site for its profound influence on the tumultuous Iranian political scene in June 2009, which many have since coined “a Twitter revolution,” he is far less gracious in regards to this latest coverage. In fact, Keating even goes so far as to dub the Haitian earthquake reporting as the first “Twitter Disaster.”

Keating explained that while the media circus surrounding Haiti is surely an interesting phenomenon, those contributing to social networking sites today are failing to provide valuable, let alone credible, newsworthy updates.

Keating said, “Haiti-related tweets seem to consist of either expressions of personal sympathy for the victims of the quake or links to news articles from other sites.” At the end of the day, Keating explained that the sheer manpower and professional capabilities of news organizations appeared to beat out Twitter’s volunteer base in the reporting of ‘real news’.

Interestingly, this is very different than what happened in Iran.

Where, as the Iranian government barred the press from entering the country, the mainstream media grew increasingly dependent on Twitter updates. On some occasions, according to the Washington Post, “The predominant information [was] coming from Twitter.”

In light of this summer’s events, and pandering to an overeager public craving up-to-the-second coverage, Twitter made the decision to rebrand itself as a news and information source in Nov. 2009.

The site did this by a seemingly simple change. Instead of asking users, “What are you doing?” when updating their statuses, the site now asked, “What’s happening?”

While the rebranding of Twitter as a news and information source has been reasonably successful, at times, it appears as though the site cannot live up to the standards we demand of traditional media.

This is something that any regular Twitter user, who undoubtedly experiences headaches stemming from site outages on a near weekly basis, can attest to.

For example, after word of aftershocks in Haiti, I hoped to see the drama unfolding first hand via #Haiti in the early morning hours of Jan. 20. However, upon attempting to log into my own Twitter account, I received the all too familiar “whale fail” image of the Twitter over capacity page.

"Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again"? Traditional media certainly would never get away with such a thing.

This was precisely the point Keating was hinting at in his article.

"In the past two decades, the news cycle has gone from the daily updates of newspapers to the up-to-the-minute coverage of cable news and the blogosphere to the up-to-the-second updates of Twitter. It's possible that we may have reached a point where information is being provided faster than users can process it, and the "news" ceases to inform at all.”

The Haiti crisis proved that social media cannot trump traditional news media just yet. However, in light of this latest exposure of social media’s current limits as a news medium, we can rest assured that the field will only better itself in the meantime.

Blogging 101 with Bryan Murley

I’m going to be honest; it took me a while to wrap my head around the concept of blogging. In fact, I found myself very disillusioned with the whole blogosphere for some time.

As a news junkie, I believed that citizen media was responsible for the downfall of traditional journalistic institutions. More simply, I believed bloggers did not possess the knowledge or the credibility to do what ‘real’ journalists did.

While my views were unarguably cynical, I wasn’t alone. In 2002, no one thought bloggers were akin to journalists. Today, however, everything has changed.

After becoming involved in the world of journalism, I have come to see the change happen before my eyes. Not only has social and participatory media become more prevalent over my few short years as a student journalist, it has become nothing short of an industry essential.

The swift shift is evident in everything from: prominent journalists tweeting and established newspapers setting up Facebook fan pages, to the normalization of blogs affiliated with major news organizations.

Last week, I was a delegate at the Canadian University Press (CUP) conference in Edmonton, Alberta. Not surprisingly, many of the sessions were on participatory, social and new media.

One conference session in particular, was purely on blogging.

The session was led by Bryan Murley, an assistant professor of new and emerging media from Eastern Illinois University. Murley made a number of interesting points which I think any blogger, whether they choose to be a “linker” or a “thinker,” should be aware of.

What I found most interesting, was Murley’s assertion that while “news used to be a lecture, now it’s a conversation.” This could not be closer to the truth.

Murley went on to explain that blogging should be second nature for journalists today. He pointed out a number of situations where a blog could help a journalist to: break news, converse with their audience, or leverage sources.

Furthermore, blogs are updated more frequently than newspapers print. Therefore, having a blog can help a writer break free from their production schedule slump.

According to Murley, in the future of journalism, bloggers will function as curators. Murley said, “As a blogger, you want to be a hub where people go to be sent away.”

Above all, according to Murley, hyperlinks are crucial to any blog. He explained, “If you don’t have any links, then you aren’t doing it right.” This is because, Murley explained, your blog is “not a newspaper on the web.”

Lastly, Murley made it very clear that “a blogger can’t tell you everything.” However, he said, “They can link to places where you can find more.”

After all of this, one is left pondering the day when blogs replace newspapers altogether. As farfetched as it may sound, this day may not be as far off as print journalists would like to think. A recent blog post on Innovation in College Media suggests that this very scenario is already underway on American college campuses.

I can’t tell you whether blogs will take over as the next journalistic medium. However, every time I see CNN’s Christiane Amanpour update her Facebook fan page, view a tweet from The Economist or scan The New York Times posts to their "At War" blog from major conflict zones, I can’t help but think a new media takeover is already upon us.