Journalism and Social Media

Two weeks ago, I participated in an interesting debate on how journalism and social media do or don’t belong together. I played the social media fanboy of the evening, while the other members of the panel were people from traditional media:Michaël Opgenhaffen (researcher and lecturer New Media at Lessius and K.U.L), Alain Gerlache (journalist at RTBF), Ivan De Vadder (political journalist at VRT), Pol Deltour (national secretary of the Vlaamse Vereniging van Journalisten) and Jos Grobben (publisher at Roularta). The debate was lead by Luc Blyaert, editor in chief of Data News.

The evening started with the results of a survey by Frank De Grave(Quadrant Communications) on the current state of Social Media used by journalists. Interesting stuff, although some members of the panel argued that the recent evolutions in the Middle East dramatically changed the adoption of tools like Twitter in the average newsroom.

There are two interesting posts that talk about this debate on https://pnintelligentdialogue.be/ and that kinda summarize some of the key elements of the evening.

The first one is titled “Journalists: to tweet or not to tweet?” by Kirsten Malfroid. The other is “Twitter, a threat to a journalist’s personal brand?” by Christian Remon.

What is your opinion about the link betweensocial media and journalism?