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Journalists are, by nature, crafty folk who are wonderfully adept at stalking — I mean, finding sources and relevant information for various and sundry stories. Well, the advent of social media has made the process of reporting all the more nuanced, and has served as a vital channel for everything from finding leads to contacting sources to sharing and furthering one's brand.
Still, as the Internet continues to expand, it can be difficult to pick and choose which tools are right for you as a journalist — it can be daunting to litter one's desktop with Twitter applications, social networks, location-based tools and blogs. At times, it's tempting to throw one's laptop into the sea and return to the days of notepads and typewriters.
Still, if one can manage to circumvent the information overload and pick and choose which tools are most effective for which purposes, social media can be an extremely effective.
Mashable spoke with an array of journalists and industry folks to see how they're using social media in their day-to-day work. Here's what we dug up.
Finding Leads, Noticing Trends
The Internet is, in essence, a huge hive of simultaneous conversation that reflects the populace's pressing concerns — from health care reform to this week's episode of Glee. Therefore, it can be quite difficult to cut through the static and put one's finger on the pulse of the story. That's where social media comes in: Tools such as Facebook and Twitter serve as excellent filters for the masses of information circulating on the web.
Aaron Lazenby, DJ for Pirate Cat Radio, was scanning Twitter one night last year when he noticed #iranelection trending. Curious, he clicked on the hashtag, and started poring over the flood of tweets about the "stolen" election.
Lazenby became fascinated with the situation, and stayed up all night talking with people in Iran and reading up on the subject. The next day, he was hanging out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporter who was completely unaware of what was going on in Iran — news of the protests had not reached the mainstream news. Lazenby seized the opportunity to tell the story.
He contacted one of his Twitter sources, who agreed to do an interview over Skype for Lazenby's radio show. The interview, in turn, was picked up by CNN's iReport, a citizen journalism portal.
"Our interactions on Twitter built enough trust between us where he was comfortable talking to me and I was comfortable using him as a source," Lazenby says. "Reading through tweet histories really can give you a good idea if the person is for real or not. I think that was critical for us getting the interview done," he says.
Brian Dresher, manager of social media and digital partnerships at USA TODAY, agrees that Twitter is an excellent source for journalists looking for leads. In fact, throughout 2009, he conducted bi-weekly training sessions with the paper's journalists in order to teach them how best to use the microblogging site. "I think the most vital [aspect of the] tool is the engagement with the audience," he says. "To not participate in conversations that are taking place or to avoid monitoring trends is going to result in lost opportunities. [By keeping up with Twitter], journalists are able to take a trend they first spot on Twitter and the real-time Internet and continue to develop it in more detail."
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