Social Media: No serious news-gathering operation can afford to ignore it

18 Jul 2011

David Levy writes in The Economist:

In the wake of the scandal currently afflicting Britain's news industry, it is tempting to believe that anything might be better than putting our faith in the ethics and trustworthiness of professional journalists. So it is a good time to review what social media means for a news industry that is, to put it kindly, in a state of flux. As Tom Standage's special report makes clear, social media and bloggers can contribute far more to news than was once thought. In recent years mainstream news organisations have often relied on them to break stories that professionals either couldn’t get to or didn’t know about, or to expose weaknesses or failures of interpretation amongst those same professionals. So there is undoubtedly a role for social media. But how far is it fundamentally reshaping the news industry? Read the rest of David's article in The Economist.