Reporting to defined user audiences

The journalism profession and eyes of audiences searching for news content are shifting. Internet technology keeps expanding and new platforms for audience interaction online are blurring the lines of traditional channels of distributions of the media industry.

Facebook phenomena

Social networking sites such as Facebook is taking advantage of Internet technology of connecting users by providing a free of charge online service allowing users to connect to old classmates, friends and colleagues.

Users can exchange real time information with defined established social groups about various topics, which can range from personal to local news within these social networks. So, how does this affect a traditional news organizations and reporters?

Facebook reports it has 300 million active users with six billion minutes spent on the server each day http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Many eyes are viewing and scanning Facebook on a regular basis. Facebook’s fastest demographic audience is 35-years-old and older. Also, more than two billion pieces of content (links, blog posts, news stories, and photos) are produced daily.

Reporters working in traditional channels of distribution in the media industry are realizing Internet audiences are not confined by market distribution. Instead, Internet audiences are defined niches that have shared interests. They use the Facebook platform for discussion. These virtual podiums enhance marketplace of ideas, which many reporters use to create content for mass audiences.

With diversified audiences and user content of Facebook, traditional reporters have more opportunities to tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.

Twittering news coverage

So, where does Twitter fit into the scheme of reporting news coverage? Twitter is another real time Internet social network allowing users to link to others with short blasts of updates about what is happening in the user’s life and surroundings. The user can use text, photo and video feeds to update.

The concept of reporting events and news as it happens is the goal of every established news organization. Several news distributors have discovered Twitter as a channel to distribute news alerts.

As messages in Twitter are restricted to 140 characters, news alerts in Twitter can only consist of a headline and a URL of the article where the full text can be read. Twitter is an additional channel where news alerts that are already available on other platforms (website, news ticker, RSS feed, and SMS alert) can also be distributed without cost for the subscriber http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/13920.

Several gateways between the existing news alert feeds and Twitter were initially build by persons who were not affiliated with the publishers of the news alerts. Even now it is not always clear if the news alerts on Twitter are officially endorsed by the original publishers.

It is clear that Twitter can be an effective tool for journalists, but journalists must not be lax on identifying their sources as well as the reliability of the source’s information. So, it means reporters must still be diligent in preserving the integrity of the profession.

Journalism remains the same, just different techniques

At its core the job of the working journalist, it has remained unchanged. It is the methods of gathering information for reporting the news to audiences, which has changed within the media industry. Also, it is the audiences that are changing with these new platforms.

Audiences are becoming more segmented and shared Internet global communities are emerging on a daily basis. The new goal of the media professional is to identify these communities and report news that is relevant to these audiences. National and local news will always be pertinent to these audiences.

Now, these communities have platforms to discuss these issues and how they impact their daily lives. Reporters now have a new duty to report as well as respond to the viewers and readers of this new platform.