In recent years, newsrooms across the world have adopted a ‘digital-first’ strategy, having realised the inevitability of a non-print world. In the real meaning of the term, a ‘digital-first’ news strategy means following the audience and being online first. But that’s not all. It also means being there in a way that taps the medium’s strengths (interactivity, to name one) so that one can go beyond print’s limitations.
The topic came up when I, along with a few other journalists, met Dr. Marcus Messner, an associate professor at the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture at the Virginia Commonwealth University, who is in India on a short visit to conduct workshops on social media journalism. Dr. Messner is pushing the digital news envelope further. For his journalism students, who use iPads as a reporting tool, he has set a ‘social media-first’ strategy.
The ‘social media-first’ idea is no gimmick. There’s enough evidence pointing to the growing importance of social media (most of the times you could just replace that term with Facebook) in the world of news. One of the strongest signals came from online analytics firm Parse.ly a few days back when it said Facebook now drives more traffic than Google does to its network of sites. Parse.ly clients include 400 media outlets, including Wired, Reuters, Mashable and Business Insider, according to reports.
Websites have always needed referrals — not everyone comes to news sites directly — and Google has been the biggest dispatcher of traffic all this while. Not anymore, at least in the more advanced news markets. This is a digital shift inside a digital disruption. But it wouldn’t have shocked anyone. Facebook is close to touching a billion daily active users. On the other hand, Google’s own attempt at a social network, Google Plus, hasn’t even remotely come close to rivalling Facebook.
‘News finding you’ phenomenon
Search Engine Watch put it well when it referred to the shift as one of “news finding you, rather than you searching for news.” And “news finding you” is a social media phenomenon, and journalists ought to be aware of how it works.
Two years back, a Pew Research Center report said, on Facebook, “news is a common but incidental experience.” What this means is, unlike those who go to the websites of newspapers to look for news, many Facebook users aren’t actually looking to get news while they are on the network. But they end up getting news.
Pew Research’s State of the News Media 2015 report extended this theme thus: “And if news in the social space is more incidental and driven to a large degree by friends and algorithms, then gaining a foothold there may be even more elusive — or at least less in the industry’s own hands — than a secure financial model.”
What’s still in the hands of newsmen is how they can do their best in dealing with the social networks that matter. A number of news organisations have social media strategies today. A few like The New York Times even have audience engagement editors, who ensure a story travels well in the social space by making it engaging. Nine of the more global news brands, including The Guardian and the BBC, are now publishing stories directly to Facebook. They are where their readers are. Also, Facebook is great at monetising content, even in mobiles.
It would, however, be wrong to assume that what works on Facebook works on any other social network. Each platform has its own dynamic. For instance, Twitter comes across as a place where people consciously seek out news, unlike on Facebook. It is also increasingly a starting point for many stories. It’s where stories break, in other words.
Dr. Messner’s students are, for instance, expected to tell a story through a series of tweets and pictures. So, he has to review them in real time, more like an editor and less like a teacher. Feature and analysis stories of his students do get published on the Website. But then, as many news organisations realise now, publishing doesn’t mark the end of work on a story. Rather, as Paul Berry, who helped found The Huffington Post, once said, “At Huffington Post, the article begins its life when you hit publish.” That’s the social media world for you.
sriram.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in
