Abstract
The last couple of years have seen a veritable explosion of enthusiastic manager-speak around social media, and how good they are for journalism. Like a coven of sharp-suited Mastermind contestants – specialist subject “How social media is the nextest bestest thing since sliced brioche” – editors and media consultants have been queuing up to explain how social media contributes positively and “enhances user experience”, while spurring reporters on to new heights of engagement and insight.
Like all high-end claims, it is not without a grain of truth. Equally, like every new fad or fashion, it needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Let's start with the positives. According to Nic Newman, former Controller Future Media, BBC Journalism, social media and the accompanying social networking are undergoing a period of rapid growth.
As a result, the nature of breaking news is fundamentally changing: the news cycle is compressing; news organisations are abandoning attempts to be the first with breaking news, seeking, instead, to being the best at verifying and curating it. Journalists are evolving to address this changed landscape. Under the banner “same values, new tools”, guidelines are being rewritten, social media editors and Twitter correspondents are being appointed, training and awareness programmes are underway.
None of this is replacing journalism. However, mainstream sites are learning, slowly, that social media such as message boards and blogs can no longer be viewed as simple “push” channels, but as forms of engagement with their audience. Meanwhile, trust in mainstream news remains unaltered. People still seek out the major players when they want a definitive version of what is going on, but this search process is increasingly mediated through social recommendation rather than more formal search processes.
To which the cynic in me replies: “Up to a point, Nic, up to a point. But is this really the unalloyed good you seem to think it is?”
One of the greatest shifts in recent years has been this compression of the news cycle, which in fact predates social media. This is very much an epiphenomenon of 24/7 publishing and the fact that your 9am exclusive may be blown out the water by a 9.02am revelation which, in turn, is as likely to appear in some local online news outlet as on social media.
Working a national newsdesk a few years back, I quickly understood the pernicious effect of such compression. It meant that fact-checking and even waiting for an official response from a ministerial press office was no longer possible. Or rather, I still tried to do these things and just about managed to do them where I had some level of exclusivity on the story, while aware that a single stray tweet could blow several hours of work out of the water as the social media estate overtook me, hurtling off in a different direction altogether.
Pressure grew, inexorably, for me to succumb to churnalism: just take what's already been reported and repurpose it for this afternoon's deadline. It struck me then that good old-fashioned journalistic values would have a hard job surviving this collision with always-on news.
It also created tensions with the editor. That stray tweet again: sometimes it would be a new fact, undercutting everything we thought we knew and sending us back to the drawing board. Fair enough. Facts matter and, so long as the provenance of that fact proved good, then we were duty bound to make use of it.
Still, the entire news edifice was now a good deal shakier.
I was reminded of this as I reported on the story of the transgender woman, Tara Hudson, sent to a men's prison. A friend and a good insider source dropped me a line suggesting that the social media “mob” were over-excited. Verification processes take time, and chances were that by the evening this would be a non-story, as the Ministry of Justice, cast as villains of the piece, would undoubtedly have changed their mind.
Wrong. The story got a lot bigger before eventually it was resolved. Had I given the ministry time to get their act together I would not have led the news, as I did for a couple of brief hours, but I failed completely in my duty as a journalist.
On the other hand, this is not, by itself, very different as an issue from the challenges of any fast-moving news story. All that has changed is the channel through which new facts are delivered.
What also has changed, though, is the way that Twitter and other social media now manage to force stories on to the news agenda, stories that sometimes would have been and gone before the print press had time to get its boots on. For instance, was the story in this case really the decision of the Ministry of Justice and the subsequent treatment of one individual? Or was it the fury unleashed across social media in respect of that decision? Was it the petition that jumped from a paltry 10,000 signatures to 50,000 in a few hours? Was it the trending hashtag? The “tweet-in”, during which activists across the globe were encouraged, at a particular hour, to take to social media and be beastly to the minister?
The answer, clearly, is all of those. The difference is that in pre-social media days, it would have taken time to whip up such fury. History records occasions where those in power have so far over-stepped the mark that the result was instant retribution: the mob to the Bastille, or the Winter Palace. But these are few and far between.
Instead, in most cases, news – and events – have tended to proceed somewhat more sedately. Ministers have made bad decisions, decisions have been appealed, civil service arms have been twisted behind the scenes and in many instances, second thoughts have been had. Occasionally, where ministers have proven unamenable to civilised discourse, marches and pickets have followed, and these, too, have been newsworthy.
Do I sound unduly old-fashioned? A nostalgist longing hopelessly for the days when the news was what journalists said it was, without all these upstart citizens thinking their views counted for something?
I hope not, since that is quite the opposite of what I believe.
My concern is that all too often the fury becomes the news and the substantive must take a back seat. Often that is healthy: instant feedback makes it that much harder for politicians – for the entire class of people with privilege – to continue complacently.
Sometimes, though, that can be seriously unhealthy. Sometimes, the fury is misplaced: the hyena pack has wheeled too soon, got its teeth into the wrong issue entirely, and we, as journalists, have little choice other than to follow, no matter how wrong headed we know this direction to be. Social media are, by their very nature, short-termist. “New tools”, but not, however much the media establishment likes to dress it, “same values”.
