BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring
Posted by Bill Ives on Wed, Feb 24, 2010
According to the Guardian (BBC tells news staff to embrace social media), BBC news journalists have been advised to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News. He took over last week and said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories. They quote him, "This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary."
We would agree. Getting material for articles is of several ways that traditional television news media needs to make use of social media to survive the social media onslaught. For BBC news editors, Twitter and RSS readers have now become essential tools and aggregating and curating content with attribution are essential skills. In addition, BBC's journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand.
We have been talking with a number of major traditional media organizations about using the Darwin Awareness Engine™ to help with their news harvesting efforts. It allows you to see what is going on around a topic and find the unexpected, as well as the news breaking in real time.
The BBC also created a social media editor post in October. This is another related trend we have reported on here (see The Rise of Social Media Directors at Mainstream News). The Guardian concludes by noting that as technology is changing the nature of journalism, the BBC is trying to keeping up with the pace. Horrocks is quoted again, "If you don't like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn't right for me, then go and do something else, because it's going to happen. You're not going to be able to stop it."