Social Media and Journalism

Nowadays, our society is full of technologies that help people to communicate with each other. The entire world is linked by what we call social media.

Some people and especially journalists consider social media as a source and use them to write stories.

But are social media legitimate sources to journalists?

It is fine for journalists to use social media to spread the information, but journalists should not use social media to find news or at least they have to be really careful during their process.

In journalism, there are six basics sources that can be find through social media

-Newsmakers: people who cause a story to happen

-Spokespeople: people who represents other people

-Experts: specialist in one or several fields that are related to the story

-Official records

-Reference material: online or library sources

-Ordinary people

The last source is the one journalists should be wary.

Indeed, anyone can create a fake story simply to attract attention. That is one power of social media: create a buzz to reach popularity.

It is easily understandable that journalism will become more and more dependent on social media, just as society became dependent of them.

News companies create social websites where people can chat and comment the news.

This is a revolution created by the emergence of the Internet and the tendency people have to use social media everyday for everything.

One day Twitter, Facebook and other social media will be considered as real sources to journalists. They are media after all.

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