Social Media and Journalism in Jamaica – Where Are We Headed?

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There isn’t any question that social media have changed journalism for good, across the world and in Jamaica. The questions now, perhaps, are how extensive that change has been, and what the media landscape will look like in the future.

The creation of the Internet, the democratization of access to publication, the instant access it created for thousands of citizen journalists to reach an international audience, all laid the groundwork for permanent change.

Think of Jamaica just twenty years ago. In the days before the Internet, and in a restricted media landscape, newsrooms could take their time getting news to the public. Events that took place in the evening probably wouldn’t make it into print until two days later. After all, if it wasn’t in the Gleaner, or on JBC and RJR, there was no other way for the public to get their news. Those with access to shortwave radio could hear international news, but local news dissemination was dependent on the local media giants.

How times have changed! With scores of ordinary people likely to be live-tweeting from anywhere and everywhere, traditional media houses have to be racing to keep up.

Consider this statement by New York Times columnist Thomas L. Freidman:

“I covered the Republican convention, and I was impressed in watching my Times colleagues at how much their jobs have changed. Here’s what a reporter does in a typical day: report, file for the Web edition, file for The International Herald Tribune, tweet, update for the Web edition, report more, track other people’s tweets, do a Web-video spot and then write the story for the print paper. You want to be a Times reporter today? That’s your day. You have to work harder and smarter and develop new skills faster.”

Barbara Blake Hannah said on my Facebook page that:

“The day of traditional media is over, just like writing with pen and paper. Look at how the report of Alpanso Cunningham’s gold medal reached FB at least a day before newspapers and TV carried the story. The power wielded by the traditional media has now passed democratically into the hands of ‘the people.’

Before we rush to sound the death knell for traditional media, however, consider that firstly, much of the news coming from the Paralympics and the blow-by-blow descriptions of Buju Banton’s trial was reported by journalists

English: Mug shot of Buju Banton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

working for traditional media houses using social media to get the news first to their online products, before sending it on to their print or broadcast editions.

In addition, many people do still recognize that traditional media regard themselves as having a responsibility to fact check stories, something often not done by tweeters and posters, so even people who get news from social media (and who doesn’t nowadays?) often still look to traditional media houses for verification.

The two most infamous examples of false reports which spread rapidly thanks (?) to social media were the repeated claims that Buju Banton had been freed, and that Kartel had escaped.

Allan Rickards expressed the desire for verification  in his FB post when he said that:

“It is not news for me until it is confirmed in the traditional media…far too often the so-called social media is a hotbed of rumour/propaganda.”

I suggest that what we are seeing is a convergence of the old and the new. Will newsprint and the traditional radio and TV newscasts become obsolete with the increasing production of news-on-demand? We may be heading there, but I don’t think it’s something we should dread. New technologies have always transformed the means of communication. From papyrus and the slate to the keyboard, from the fountain pen to the stylus, technological developments have improved the ability to communicate with the public.

Mark you, I am sure there were naysayers who hated the idea of printing presses which would produce thousands of books that anyone could read.

“What about the job security of the men who write the books by hand?” I can hear them asking. “This is going to lead to mass unemployment!”

Or when paper was developed, there was probably someone getting up in meetings and objecting on the basis that the rivers would become overrun with weeds if they weren’t being harvested to make papyrus.

Photo by nattavut at freedigitalphotos.net

This article in the Economist, looks at the evolution of the relationship between social and traditional media, from the days when a senor news executive felt able to make the derisive comment that a blogger was just someone “in his living room in his pyjamas writing what he thinks” to the present day when social media are seen as “a valuable adjunct to traditional media.”

The writer chronicles how the story about the death of Osama Bin Laden developed on Twitter for example, and how social media helped spread the massive story of the Arab spring.

“Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information,” said the Economist.

Jamaican media houses have recognized the importance of not being left behind. The Press Association of Jamaica now has an award for on-line journalism, and newsrooms are trying to ensure that they break stories on social media, instead of playing catch-up to on-line-only outlets.

At this stage I have no idea what the future will look like. After all, I’m now in love with an E-reader which I never thought possible! See my post on my new-found love for E-readers here.

The Huffington Post has proven that online media products can be successful. The old models are doubtless being transformed as we speak, but I hardly think there will be an end to journalism or jobs for journalists. What those jobs look like has already changed significantly, and is likely to change still further. But then, as the New York Times’ Friedman says, “Any form of standing still is deadly.”

The Jamaica Broilers Fair Play Awards is being held Tuesday, September 11 and will highlight the importance of social media. Perhaps the featured speaker Saadiq Rodgers-King , a successful social media entrepreneur, will have some ideas about what the future will look like. If he does, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Disclosure – I’ll be participating in the function.

 

News and Newsworthiness in the Age of Social Media

Photo - Palto

I received several very interesting and thoughtful responses to my post “Is the Yendi Story “News?” and wanted to share them with you and continue the conversation about what makes a story newsworthy. It’s a question which members of the public often ask, baffled about the content of a newscast or stories on the main pages of a newspaper.

Journalism professor Tony Rogers in an article on About.com outlined the basic criteria as follows:

Impact or Consequences

Conflict

Loss of Life/Property Destruction

Proximity

Prominence

Timeliness

Novelty

In relating those factors to the Yendi story, communications lecturer and broadcaster Hume Johnson made a similar list on my blog:

1. Proximity.
2. Significance
3. Relevance.
4. Prominence.
5. Human Interest.
6. Conflict.
7. Unusualness.

She said:

Photo - Rosengurtt at en.wikipedia

“The Yendi story satisfies #4. She is, for all intents and purposes a celebrity – prominent individual in our Jamaican community. So it is news. Yet the particular story is only ‘soft’ news. Should we give attention to soft news? I would say depends on where in the paper you put it. Front page – that would be absolutely scandalous; yet those whose aim is to sell newspapers will trump a political story for a soft news story because the ‘business model’ of the media industry and the revenue agenda would be chief determinant in this scenario.”

The problem, of course, is that these criteria are applied subjectively by editors.

Hillary Profita, formerly of CBS (the home of 60 Minutes) pointed this out in a 2006 article on the company’s websitein the context of a discussion about the role that race and class play in leading US news outlets to cover stories  like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway (white, middle-class, teenager), while ignoring that of  Marion Fye, (36 years old, a single mother of five children, unemployed and African American).

Natalee Holloway (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She suggested that an indicator of the public’s rejection of the criteria applied by editors could be

“…the fact that more are veering toward the Internet to get news, where to a greater degree the news judgement is one’s own.”

She also echoes the sentiment I expressed about how editors and newsroom people decide what is newsworthy in noting that:

“…editors claim to know (what is newsworthy) when they see it. Unfortunately, in my view, that decision seems to boil down to what those of us in newsrooms, and not readers, care about.

And there’s the problem. What draws the interest of people in the news business (what they like to read and write about) often bears little relationship to what people who live in communities like Marion Fye’s care about. In that sense, what newspapers deem “newsworthy” is not actually information that is most relevant in terms of its potential effect on readers’ and viewers’ lives, but what is most out of the ordinary.”

It was in that vein that I had disagreed with Hume’s analysis by stating that:

“The story satisfies no. 1 – proximity – she is a celebrity, but she is ours, she is Jamaican, we all watched her become runner-up in Miss Universe and many people have been following her career. People feel close to her.

It also satisfies no. 5 – human interest. It is also unusual, no. 7 – of course, not in the sense of a woman becoming pregnant for a man, but the surrounding circumstances, the announcement on FB, the reactions and huge response, combined to make the way this story unfolded unusual – that fueled the story still more.

Relevance – no. 3 – I don’t know who determines what is relevant – if people are interested in someone or something, news about that person or thing will always be relevant.

…timeliness – again, she broke the news, the reactions started then she fueled it with the interview, and all this was being reported as it happened.”

Keriann took the discussion further by placing the story squarely within the framework of the social media age.

Author - Jeff Ogden

“It most certainly satisfied news value no.6 as well – conflict. The responses illustrated a conflict of values in the society. The country was clearly divided among those who thought the circumstances were no big deal and those who disapproved, and each side was vociferous about its position. That conflict matters, because each society (especially developing ones) must determine the value systems that will inform policies, laws, etc.

Unusual is also being defined too narrowly as a news value. It does not only address the sensational (man bites dog). It describes that which is unexpected. And the reactions have made it clear that Yendi was not expected to make the choices she did. If she was, there would not have been any heavy interest in her announcement or the aforementioned conflict.

Your argument about timeliness and the age of her pregnancy is also flawed. The stories of the intense reaction were carried within hours of the intense reaction. And it’s the reactions which made the story big. Also, if we’re discussing the pregnancy itself as a story (which it was for entertainment segments), then the age of the pregnancy doesn’t matter. It’s when the public discovers it, that it matters. The birth of former US presidential candidate John Edwards’ love child did not become news until well after the child was born.Should American media have ignored the story because they didn’t know about it as soon as his lover was pregnant? In cases when pregnancies are news, they do not become news when the parents become aware. They become news when the public does.

All journalism students will be familiar with your list of news values because it was developed to provide a means of helping media practitioners determine which stories will be of public interest. The closer an editor or journalist followed those principles, the more s/he was guaranteed public interest, which is the ultimate aim. It’s a shortcut to the right decision because naturally, editors cannot pick up the phone and call every potential news consumer everyday or conduct a focus group before choosing stories. So s/he unconsciously applies the news value test to stories everyday, hoping s/he made the right call. o The level of interest in her story will tell her whether s/he applied the principles well. Overtime, if a news source keeps making the wrong decisions, it will be penalised with low ratings in the market.

Photo - Wikimedia Commons

But here’s the clincher: in the age of social media when a story immediately goes viral, the public interest is already apparent! When there is already public interest, your system for determining public interest doesn’t need to be dissected because the end result (which the system was set up to determine) has already been achieved. It’s like working an equation backwards. You must get the same result or your inputs were wrong.”

Thanks to all who have commented and Hume and Keriann in particular for their thoughtful and considered respones. I’d love your comments as well. Is the migration to social media an indicator that traditional media are ignoring the interests of the public? Do newsrooms need to rethink how they apply the criteria of what constitutes a newsworthy story? And as Keriann suggests, if a story goes viral on social media, does that  make the list redundant?

Is the Yendi Story “News?”

Yendi Phillips
Photo – Wikimedia Commons

Of course not, traditionalists say. How can that be news? Well, it certainly doesn’t fit into the politics-economy-crime triumvirate with which we like to bombard our listeners and viewers. Forget the fact that people are interested in a much wider range of issues such as health, diet and nutrition, consumer affairs, and yes, entertainment.

God forbid we cover and talk about what people are interested in. No, to make the bulletin, it must be about the Net International Reserves, the International Monetary Fund, five people gunned down somewhere or a cass-cass in one of the political parties (which many people give not one hoot about – I actually think that most of the people interested in the happenings within the political parties are the politicians, their die hard supporters and we reporters).

I’m not saying Yendi’s pregnancy should have led the newscast. Please. But most major newscasts entirely ignore anything in the entertainment arena which doesn’t involve ground-breakings and speeches by government Ministers.

Many of us in media have very straight-laced, hide-bound and yes, out-of-date

Photo by DNY59

notions about what constitutes the “news” and what we should be talking about on current affairs programmes. The issues of interest to the lives of most people are often ignored.

Case in point – I once had a huge argument in the newsroom because I wanted to interview the author of a book about marriage and divorce from a Christian perspective. The book in question is called “The Man I Married is Not My Husband, the Woman I Married is Not My Wife.” It was written by a priest who spent years doing marriage counselling. My colleagues  couldn’t see how that issue was relevant to a current affairs discussion programme. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   Well, it’s relevant to people’s lives. By definition for me, that makes it current.

(Disclosure: I have a personal connection with the author. Having said that, the book is a fascinating read, and it’s in local bookstores. Go look for it! )

Entertainment is big business and entertainers have millions of fans.  Vision 2030 states that:

“Cultural and creative industries represent one of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy, representing up to 7% of the world’s GDP with growth forecast at 10% per annum, driven in part by the convergence of media and the digital economy.”

The document further states:

“…while Jamaican music accounts for an estimated 3% of world music sales, amounting to US$1 billion in 2003, the country itself received only 25% of this sum or some US$250 million.”

Tell me, how is anything to do with an industry like that NOT big news?

Wikimedia load spike on June 25, 2009, following news of Michael Jackson’s death (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Beeb, the BBC, surely one of the most conservative news-gathering organisations in the world, led several newscasts with the death of Michael Jackson, and covered his doctor’s trial extensively. Were there no wars or famines anywhere else in the world? Yes, but on the day Michael Jackson died, no one (slight exaggeration perhaps!) was interested in anything else. There was no bigger story. The BBC, and everybody else, HAD to acknowledge that.

60 Minutes is one of the most respected news magazine programmes in the world. They cover entertainment issues and interview celebrities. ALL THE TIME. It is their treatment of the issues that sets them apart from the National Enquirer. Examples of recent stories they’ve dealt with – interviews with Adele and young country star Taylor Swift. 

People no longer have to wait for RJR and JBC, once the only game in town, to deliver the news we want to give them, when we want to give it to them.  No, the advance of technology has democratized media, and the public can now get, and indeed demands, real-time news delivery on issues in which they are passionately interested. Not all of us understand that yet.

Image via CrunchBase

Many reporters – and people who don’t participate – see social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as a waste of time. Can you waste hours on Twitter and FB? Of course. But with 800 million active users on Facebook and 500 million users on Twitter, are we really going to ignore the power of those new media? That is where people are talking to each other, and sharing information. That is where you can gauge WHAT people are talking to each other about, especially in the case of Twitter.

Which takes us back to Yendi. She chose to announce her pregnancy on FB.The news spread quickly, and the newspapers reported it on their websites. Was that a bad decision? Was that violating the standards of journalism? Let’s go back to the basics of journalism. What are the elements of a story? Who, what, where, when, why and how. The issue here is the “who.”

I checked her social media stats. Yendi has over 15,000 followers on Twitter, and over 144,000 likes on FB. Granted she’s still a baby compared to Lady Gaga who has over 23,000,000 followers on Twitter and over 50,000,000 likes on FB. Still, Yendi’s numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

Image via CrunchBase

So there is a sizeable community of people interested in her and in news about her. So, yes, whether I personally care anything about Yendi or not, any news editor and producer must understand that stories about her are legitimate news stories.

Now, news of her pregnancy would normally be slotted into the entertainment news segments. But the reaction to the announcement was not normal. The explosion of comment led to the issue “trending” on Twitter, meaning it was one of the top issues being discussed. That is huge, and THAT catapulted the story out of the entertainment news niche.

A range of issues has emerged from the discussions and chatter –  the concern about people seen as role models having children out of wedlock, the color issue, the class issue, the Rasta issue and more. There are many issues that can be treated in a thoughtful way, that would take the discussion beyond veranda suss and still hold the interest of people interested in the story.

Everywhere I went, this was what people were discussing. They were reading the posts on the internet and watching Yendi’s interview. Make sure you understand that even the people saying everybody should leave Yendi alone WERE STILL TALKING ABOUT THE STORY!

Should we ignore the clear interest in this issue and focus exclusively on the Net International Reserves et al?  Sure , we can do that. But don’t be surprised if one day we wake up to find that we are talking to nobody but ourselves.

So, now that I’ve had my say, what do YOU think?

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