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Posted by Mo Elnadi, Reptile Group Head of Digital Strategy & Social Media

Last Friday I attended the BBC Social Media Summit, the event was packed with academics, social media consultants, and journalists.

One of the questions that recurred frequently throughout the digital panel discussions was whether journalists should rely on social media to break news as fast as possible, or stick to conventional methods of verifying news, lest they spread false or inaccurate information.

 

I found this discussion interesting, given that the BBC relies increasingly on Twitter as a news feed and to flag reports on the social network and especially as I had a similar debate during another conference with Cisco at which I was guest speaker earlier last week.

The fact is that Social Media channels are connecting the public and journalists in ways that were not possible a few years ago however, so the question shouldn’t have been addressed as an “either/or” discussion.

A more productive discussion would have been how to best verify sources on Social Media instead of attempting to compare the two types of information as different media competing with one another. I believe firmly that the two methods complement rather than compete with each other.

Social Media is here to stay and it will only grow, further shifting and fragmenting our media consumption patterns. The genie is out of the bottle and the public will increasingly share and take account of stories as they develop on Social Media, believing it offers needed timely information and transparency.

In other words, I’d rather get timely real-time information about emerging events such as the Japanese reactor explosion, a possible Tsunami warning or the latest development in the Egyptian revolution, than wait few hours until someone in a newsroom verifies every single number or name before it reaches me. A good example would be Esra Dogramaci’s presentation on how Al Jazeera used Social Media channels to collaborate with Egyptian protesters at Tahrir square.

But there is a difference between reporting and journalism. Social Media is a very valuable tool for reporting; however journalists still have the responsibility to verify facts and sources. I don’t see a contradiction between doing both well.

Increasingly we are integrating ever more sources to form our view of the world. And part of this is choosing to harness the wisdom of crowds, breaking news in real-time, whilst information is refined, verified and analysed by editors and journalists for the evening bulletins.

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