Journalism's adoption of social media

By Leigh Armstrong

Social media is becoming a huge part of the journalism industry with many publications learning to take advantage of the things like Twitter and Facebook. Given the huge cultural change that's upon us with the revolution of social media, taking the opportunity to look at three different types of journalists and how they use social media seems as though it may yield some interesting results. I chose to look at a famous technology journalist who works online, an older pop-culture journalist at a major newspaper and a more recent college graduate who works at Spanish newspaper.

Jason Chen of Gizmodo. Twitter: diskopo

Jason Chen is the lead and original writer for Gizmodo, an online technology blog. He currently has 6463 followers on Twitter. He seems to update regularly with tweets every couple of hours either from the web or his iphone. His tweets are mostly technology or geek culture related with a few outliers being personal. All of them come off as personal, but professional. Chen has a good correspondence with his audience with many @replies to his followers. His followers seem to retweet him when it is dealing with breaking technology stories. Chen keeps his personal information at a minimum with “Gizmodo. That's me.” all that's written in the bio.

Steve Spears of the St. Petersburg Times. Facebook: facebook.com/stevespears

Steve Spears writes the Stuck in the 80's blog, a blog about 80's pop culture, for the St. Petersburg Times and has 921 friends on his Facebook. His updates are on a daily basis with most of them being involved with links to his new blog posts or quick info about the 80's. All of his updates receive a large amount of feedback with the average number of comments per update being around 15-20. There are very few strictly personal updates and those are usually how he relates to a certain story. His followers give generally positive feedback and react to his updates with humorous comments and Steve has a tendency to comment back. His wall is full of posts from other people who often post other 80's related information. His about me section is completely fleshed out with quotes, interests, education and contact information.

Melissa Sanchez of El Nuevo Herald. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php id=2320675&v=wall&ref=ts

Melissa Sanchez is a GA reporter for El Nuevo Herald in Miami and has 365 friends on her Facebook. Her updates are more sporadic but she seems to put in an update to her status at least once per week. Her facebook is populated with personal updates by both her and her friends. There is more user interaction from her friends than from herself on her wall. There doesn't seem to be any redistribution of information put up by Sanchez but each update that she posts will usually gather a few comments. In her about me section, Most sections and contact info have been fully filled out.

The one thing I found that all of the journalists analyzed have a lot of differences. The most frequent updater (Jason Chen) is also the one with the biggest following group and his posts seem to be pretty focused on his given subject matter. He also is the most widely known journalist with an international audience. While they all have a few personal updates, Sanchez's profile seems completely based on this with the only signifier that she is a journalist is through her “about me” section where it lists her job. It seems as though the professionalism required and the types of updates in social media is directly relatable to the size of the organization. Since Sanchez works for a small publication, she can put less of an emphasis on social media where someone like Chen could not.