South African blogger Herman Manson has posted an article on Memeburn (‘the South African Mashable’), questioning whether that by breaking news, Twitter will also break journalism.

There are plenty of examples of tweets being reported as fact without them being checked.   For example, the (UK) Daily Mail reported that the iPhone4 was being recalled after a Steve Jobs Twitter account – a fake one – sent out a message about it.

Similarly in South Africa, Manson looks at what happened after ex police commissioner Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption.

If you scanned Twitter immediately after the trial you would have thought that Selebi was guilty of both corruption and obstructing justice.    But actually Selebi was only guilty of the 1st charge.    The problem was that in the haste to get the 1st tweet out, a journalist got it wrong and with the tweets and retweets, this then became the story.

Manson points to an econsultancy piece by Jake Hird where he published an infographic showing how news breaks and spreads post Twitter.     As Jake’s graphic shows, Twitter very often precedes news outlets in spreading news, which means a lot of editors end up playing catch-up.

Urging journalists to add social media and Twitter into their codes of conduct, Manson says: “With Twitter able to deliver news quickly and to a potentially huge audience due to its viral nature, already-pressured newsrooms are under increasing pressure to get content out, and to get it out fast.”

And when they get it wrong based on a series of tweets, the damage is done – in the Jackie Selebi case, a correction was tweeted out, but by then, the original Twitter version had become gospel.

(The full memeburn article)

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• Twitter and breaking news – a match made in heaven, or hell? (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Three in five journalists believe the rise of digital media has improved content (prweek.com)
• The Media Blog: Mail falls for fake Steve Jobs tweet (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

While the New York Times reports that 2009 was officially the worst year for the newspaper industry in ‘decades’, journalism blogger and pundit Alan Mutter says 2010 could be even worse.

Three US based stats from Alan’s blog:

1 – Classified advertising is down a massive 64% from the $17.3 billion it brought US papers in 2005.  Thanks Craiglist, and in the UK, the likes of gumtree

2 – Retail advertising was down 36% over the same period

3 – National advertising was down 44% since 2005

The problem is of course also a demographic one.   Apparently in the US, the average age of newspaper readers is 55+ as shown in the video below (via Steveouting.com).

And the UK probably isn’t too different in that respect, a Parliamentary Committee two years ago found that newspaper readership fell 40% among 25-34 year olds, but rose by 4% among 55-64 year olds – and if anything that trend will have increased over the past two years, given that the UK nationals have lost more than the population of Wales in readers since then.

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• Times editor: ‘We are going to lose a lot of passing traffic’ (guardian.co.uk)
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‘Where do stories come from?’ asks an article on Media Post.   While previous research showed that online media only accounts for 4% of what you might call ‘new news’, journalists definitely do use it to supplement and build on stories and find out additional information.

A study by George Washington University and Cision found that 89% of journalists turn to blogs for research, 65% to social media sites like Facebook, 52% to Twitter.   And Wikipedia?  Over 6/10 (61%) consult it.

Overall 55% of journalists thought that social media was either somewhat or very important.   However, at the same time 84% said it was ‘slightly less’ or ‘much less’ reliable than traditional media.

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• The New Media Relations (proactivereport.com)
• Most Print and Online Journalists Use Social Media for Story Research (poynter.org)
• The Information Divide: The Socialization of News (briansolis.com)

Fellow online PR Danny Whatmough posed the question today about whether social media is really about ‘ego.’   Clearly I don’t think it is, but in reply I referenced the Oxford Academic Press stat that the second most popular word on Twitter is “I.”

Journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles then joined the conversation to point out that incidences of “I” tend to vanish around lunchtime, so most narcissists tend to be around in the morning (that’s when I tweet…).

Malcolm originally published his post in April, but the chart on his blog from Trendistic is a dynamic one (I’ve taken a version below) and so the results are constantly up to date.   And sure enough, the Dec stats show exactly the same as the April ones.

Every single day last week the use of “I” in tweets was at a high in the morning in the UK (so middle of the Night US – when maybe people are on who don’t use Twitter professionally?), visibly dropped by lunch GMT (7am EST), and then started climbing again until it reached its late night US / early morning UK peak.

Not sure how much you can really read into this, but it does give an indication of when personal tweeters who talk about their lives are likely to be on, and when you can catch those who log on mainly for work / network building reasons.

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• I’ve changed my Twitter follow policy and some thoughts on Twitter lists and the infamous retweet (digital-constructions.com)
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Bob Knorpp of the Beancast (which I’m on tonight) alerted me to this statement by Yates Buckley of Unit 9, made to coincide with last week’s Creativity and Technology event at London’s Saatchi Gallery:

“If you are a creative and don’t know about technology you’ll be out of a job soon.”

It’s a statement that I imagine touched a lot of raw nerves as it zeroes in on the debate raging in agencies today.  In fact, I’d point to another quote made by Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade the other month that nicely encapsulates it.   Greenslade talked about the fundamental divide between those who think the digital media revolution is transformative, or whether it’s tactical.

Substitute the word marketing in place of journalism here:

The split (in the pro and anti camps) is both philosophical and practical.

“There are those (with whom I agree) who believe that the digital media revolution is in the process of transforming journalism and those (such as Murdoch and most traditional newspaper publishers) who believe the net is merely another platform rather than an instrument of transformation.”

It’s a complex argument, but the truth as always surely lies somewhere in between.

I tell the 20-something execs at Cow that the skills set they’ll need in ten years time is different to the skills set they have now (and we have a responsibility to help them get there).   That’s due to consumers, and so agencies, straddling the old and new media divide, meaning that you still need to know about the old way of doing things while also embracing the new.

Beth Harte in fact expresses it perfectly in her post ‘PR 2.0 will double your workload‘.

Perhaps the voice of sanity in all this comes from Iain Tait of Poke, an agency that’s squarely at the forefront of digital marketing.   Iain talks about the dangers of getting carried away with technology for the sake of it:

“Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power, I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweetshop.   Do we need all that?  People like things that are free and simple – money likes stuff that is slick.   Building big things is fun and impresses people, but it has no value.”

Image – Sammy0716