Social Media Montana

Shaq tweets that his “numbers” aren’t good enough so he’s got three more years in the league.  Perez Hilton tweets that Adam Lambert is now on Twitter.  Senator John McCain tweets that he’s at a radio station for an interview.

I don’t know why anyone cares, but evidently they do.  Twitter is the latest incarnation of social media, a category of communication tools that includes MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, text messaging, Flickr, YouTube and blogs.

You can read soporific tomes that describe each medium in detail, but social media is simply a means where anyone can share information (text, audio or video) with anyone and everyone, virtually instantaneously.  Being “published” takes nothing more than a few mouse clicks.

As social media matures, questions about its future arise.  For instance, will social media overcome its image as a frivolous time-wasting pursuit of teenagers and become a major source of reliable news and information?

To some degree, it already has.  While Twitter is still in its infancy, the other forms of social media are in budding adolescence.  Politicians, leaders, public figures and traditional news outlets all over the world use social media to keep constituents, fans and followers informed.

Social media will soon be ubiquitous, and as culturally integrated as television and radio.  Maybe more so.

Still, social media has been used primarily to disseminate traditionally-gathered information from the few to the many.  If social media is to become a player in hard news generation, it will have to operate in reverse, bringing information to the few for editing and formatting.

Social-mediaphiles point to the Twitter “revolution” in Iran as proof that a simple social media tool can unify thousands toward a common goal while giving the rest of the world a man-on-the-street view of events in real time.

Pundits argue social media’s impact in Iran.  Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 Web Tech said in Business Week, “I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect.”  It’s estimated that of all the Iranians involved in recent protests, only a few thousand use Twitter.  And many of the tweets broadcast about the protests are actually coming from disenfranchised Iranians who are not even in the country.

Still, the U.S. government thought Twitter was such an important tool in disseminating protest information that they asked Twitter to postpone network upgrades to protect the interests of Iranians using the service.

Infancy or not, Twitter may well be the Iranians best means for keeping their protests in the news.  It’s free, quick, totally public, very mobile and hard for the government to control.

But is the “news” broadcast by Twitter and other social media outlets “journalism”?  No, but not because it isn’t valuable and beneficial.  And not because media can’t use it as a foundation for journalism.  Info gathered via social media is raw.  Until processed and vetted in journalism, it’s credibility and relevance are unknown.

Journalism is a process, analogous to the scientific method.  Created and refined over centuries of trial and error, journalism is a methodical system for collecting, verifying, formatting and disseminating information.  Facts and information are components of journalism, and the people responsible for taking them through the process are called journalists.

Anyone can be a reporter.  Observe an event and report what you saw, and voila! you’re a reporter.  But you’re only a journalist when you operate within the system of journalism.  Anyone can be a journalist.  It’s not a club reserved for the journalism-school elite (although many paid journalists think so).

Using the science analogy, suppose you had a Twitter following of 50 million worldwide.  You send out a call for reports on climate change so you can compile “news” on Global Warming.  You get 10 million responses, and when digested and distilled, they form a report titled, Global Warming: Much Worse Than Feared.

Is this science?  No.  The information could be quite valuable and it could be an aid to research, but it’s not science until it’s been subjected to the scientific method.  The same is true of information gathered via social media.  Until it has been through the journalistic process, it’s nothing more than data.

Social media is a tool, not a process.

Social media can aid, augment and enhance journalism.  In fact, the future of journalism my depend on social media as a means to gather information and stay current on breaking events.  But trying to create solid news outside the boundaries of journalism is like offering herbal therapy to a cancer patient.  You might get lucky, but it’s a sucker’s bet.

There is an element of trust in journalism, and when that trust is broken, credibility suffers.  Like science, journalism is sometimes misapplied, resulting in “bad news” and outright fiction.  Still, it’s not the system that failed, but rather the application of the system.  Ultimately, the system is self-correcting.

The New York Times works very hard to see that every word it prints is the byproduct of solid journalism.  They’re not perfect, but because they consider the process of journalism sacred, 99 percent of their content is reliable.

If social media adopts the premise that, if enough people report, somebody is bound to get it right, it will never become a trusted source for news.  It will have all the credibility of a 3:00 a.m. infomercial for a vitamin-laden colon cleanser.  That doesn’t mean what’s reported is necessarily incorrect, only that it hasn’t been vetted by the journalistic process.

The National Enquirer got it right when it broke the story of presidential candidate John Edwards’s extra-marital affair, but no one considers the Enquirer a serious journalistic entity.  Journalism is about trying to get it right every time.  It’s hard work.

Wikipedia is a tremendous source for information on just about everything, but even rural high school students doing online research are forbidden to cite it as a reference.

Recently, a student in Ireland posted a fake quote on Wikipedia and several respected media outlets published it as fact.  Now, their reputations are severely damaged.  What’s interesting is that Wikipedia worked very hard to remove the quote, but since their business model allows posting of virtually anything before being vetted, their reputation took a hit as well.

Andrew Lih, an editor/administrator of Wikipedia said, “To the prospective journalist: there is no better place to start researching a story than Wikipedia, and probably no worse place to stop and use as a final word.”

Newspapers are dying and the future of sound journalism will be online, probably within the next ten years.  Social media entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on the immense potential of social media to bring news to the people would be wise to educate themselves on the power and process of journalism, lest they overlook the one element that could bring credibility to a medium born in social anarchy.

Journalism could be the ISO 9000 of social media.

If social media tries to reinvent news to be a socially correct, consensus of interpretation, then pray it dies a quick and agonizing death.  But if it works as an aid to bring journalism to the next level, embrace it.

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