Teaching Journalismin the Social Media Era

Shel Holtz, ABCAugust 20, 2009

Important overall numbers 3/4 of Americans use social technology

73% have read a blog and 45% have started one 55% have uploaded photos 83% have watched online videos

25% of Americans watched a short video in the last month…on their phone

2/3 of global online population use social networks 96% of GenYers have joined a social network

They’ll outnumber Baby Boomers next year

Important overall numbers Visiting social sites is 4th most popular

online activity(it’s ahead of email)

Time spent on social networks growing at 3x time spent on Internet in general

Social sites account for 10% of all time spent online

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations Only 14% trust advertisements

A quick review ofA quick review ofthe basicsthe basics

How we got here Decline of trust Rise of word-of-mouth Crumbling of barriers

What is social media?

The online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives and to collaborate with each other

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The Old Model

WikiWikiWikiWikiBlogBlogBlogBlog

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The New Model

Important numbers about channels If Facebook were its own country, it would rank

4th in population (between US and Indonesia) People spend 5 billion minutes on Facebook every day People share 1 billion units of content on Facebook every

week Flickr hosts 3.6 billion images

1 for every 2 people on earth Twitter grew 1,382% between January and February

People send 3 million tweets every day iTunes offers more than 100,000 podcasts, more

than double the number of radio stations worldwide 18 new articles are posted to 20 million active

blogs every second

Consequences Content and attention are moving to the edge Organizations cannot control their messages Groups form and act…at no cost

Impact on Journalism Importance of professional journalism

Diminished but not gone Needs to find its place

Models for the business of journalism Old models disrupted New models not yet in place

“The News Finds Me” In reality, always has Now…

More personalized Much faster

How the news finds me Google news alerts RSS feeds Social news sites

Digg (human powered) TechMeme (automated)

The professional/citizen mix Growing importance Not going anywhere

The professional/citizen mix Embrace the ecosphere

The shift to the Web Embrace the link ethic

The shift to the Web Be hyperlocal

The shift to the Web Embrace your readers Report in a continuum

Understand media for reporting

The business of journalism Subscription models won’t work

Niches excepted (e.g., WSJ, FT) A mix could work

Subscriptions Advertising Micropayments ???

Step One:

Step Two:

The Print Model

The Web Model

The business of journalism Experimentation

Can print be saved? Play to strengths

Portability Collectibility Local angles (What national news mean to me?) Connection The package and the serendipity of discovery

Ultimate goal: Generate word of mouth

A particular focus: Video 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube

every minute It would take 415 years to watch all YouTube

videos 100 million YouTube videos are viewed every

day YouTube is #3-ranked Website, #2-ranked

search engine Behind Google Ahead of Facebook, Bing and Wikipedia

PR’s role Culture of transparency Encourage/equip front line Unique stories Connect leaders to new marketplace realities Mid-course corrections resulting from

monitoring Earn media coverage that gets blogger

attention Guide company/client adoption of new media Know when to apply old rules Become the trusted peer

Advertising’s role Guide people to the conversation

What (else) to teach SEO Flexibility Think like a freelancer (you may be one) Continuum of reporting

Twitter -> Blog -> Full article Curator of links Develop a digital footprint Web 2.0 dimensions of reporting (in every class) Role of news crowdsourcing & citizen journalism Ethics/accuracy/balance Transparency re info gathering Multimedia

Copyright applies to this document – some rights reserved.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution-non commercial-share alike 3.0 licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0

Questions?

• Shel Holtz, ABC

Phone: 415.367.3820Email: shel@holtz.comWeb: www.holtz.com Blog: blog.holtz.comPosterous: shelholtz.posterous.comPodcast:

www.forimmediaterelease.bizSkype: shelholtzTwitter: www.twitter.com/shelFriendFeed: shelholtz2nd Life: Shel Witte