How Social Media Is Helping The Traditional Newsroom
Rome Hartman, Rachel Sterne, Michael Meyers and Scott Karp on the UGCX stage
This morning we visited mediabistro.com’s user-generated content focused conference, UGCX, to listen in on a conversation about how social media is changing the face of the newsroom.
The morning panel, moderated by “BBC World News America” executive producer Rome Hartman, featured Ground Report editor-in-chief Rachel Sterne, NowPublic co-founder Michael Meyers and Publish2 co-founder Scott Karp and conversation ranged from water-skiing squirrels to Fox News.
Sterne and Meyers talked about how user-generated journalism and informational content can change the face of reporting news, using their own models as examples of that. Both Ground Report and NowPublic use a Wikipedia type model that allows citizen journalists to publish their own work. Meyers also oversees Examiner.com, which hires expert “examiners” to write about specific topics. Karp’s company helps traditional media organizations curate social media from the Web in real time, helping reporters gather news.
The result of these new sites and tools is that “regular people, like us, or anybody, have more power to contribute to the news process,” Sterne said.
Karp pointed out another upside: traditional media organizations can quickly update or correct stories. Where once a newspaper would publish once a day, sometimes with incomplete information, now they can constantly update stories, folding information from social media into reporting done the old fashioned way. This is more important than ever, he said, since “people are following in real time.”
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