CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
For the last few years media executives and consultants seem to be concerned with only one issue: How traditional news outlets can prepare themselves for what ought to be one of the biggest changes in recent history of distribution and potential market growth – the online business. Not only has digitalization brought new possibilities of reaching audiences as well as clients all around the world, but actually changed the way people communicate and interact with each other. This also means that news distribution itself has to face a new environment: Readers, listeners and viewers are not passive consumers any more but actually engage with news sources and play a growing role in the shaping of what the news business of the future will look like. One key to this new game are social media platforms. It seems crucial that media firms engage with these new forms of communication in order to stay competitive and follow an old rule: to be where your consumers are. But while this looks like a tough task for media outlets like newspapers or broadcasting companies, for news agencies it could prove even more difficult, especially if they mainly rely on a business to business model. How can news agencies use social media and at the same time maintain their core business of selling news on a subscription basis? Nobody will deny that social networks play a very important part in the development of future communication markets, as the figures speak for themselves: At the end of 2012 close to 1.9 billion people were using social networks in one or the other way.1 These users are able to interact with one another, as well as with countless news companies who have entered the social media world. Thus journalism not only has to cope with what shaped the last decades in regards to changing work flows – from the first computers and content management systems to new means of gathering and distributing news via online channels – but it is also confronted with a new type of audience. People are able to gather more news from many different channels than ever before, using traditional sources like newspapers, television or radio alongside online sources or apps on their smart phones. This means nothing less than the need for news companies to rethink the way they handle information, deal with commentary and engage with both their audiences and their customers. Many traditional players have developed strategies to deal with these challenges. Whether it is a more focused approach to their core potential whilst distinguishing the key benefits of old media or an attempt to serve both worlds, the analogue as well as the digital. But still there are big differences if a media outlet tries to distribute its news via a website – regardless of whether it is behind a pay wall or not – or via social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. Whereas the website can almost be categorized as a safe environment as all the power over its content lies in the hands of editors, journalists and IT people, social media is something completely different. Here, the power lies with the user – at least to a certain extent. As soon as a posting has been made, the linking and sharing can start, being probably the most powerful tool for the audience. This can be identified as the biggest potential for reaching new recipients. At the same time there is the danger of losing control over the usage of certain amounts of information with the link to the original posting always being present. “Social media is a term used to describe the type of media that is based on conversation and interaction between people online. Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” – Wikipedia For almost two decades, the web has changed the world and revolutionized how information is stored, published, searched and consumed. The ripple effect has spread so wide that it impacts not just businesses and industries but crosses over into politics, medicine, media and breaches geographical locations, cultural boundaries and ultimately, affects people’s day to day lives. The great wave of web innovation since Google in 1998 has been in social media. Social media is about networking and communicating through text, video, blogs, pictures, status updates on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or microblogs such as Twitter. What makes social media of particular interest to journalism is how it has become influential as a communication and news-breaking tool. In June 2009, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance on the service because it was being used by protestors angered by the results of Iran’s disputed presidential election. In July 2009, a Twitter user in Jakarta beat most major news companies by tweeting about the Bali bombings. More recently, Google and Microsoft began integrating Twitter messages into their respective search engines, a new feature described as real-time search of the problem