Julie Posetti and the Twitterisation of Journalism

University of Canberra Journalism lecturer and social media researcher/consultant Julie Posetti was in Melbourne recently to give a talk at the Wheeler Centre on the “Twitterisation of Journalism”, a subject she is currently writing a PhD thesis on. While she was here, the Melbourne Press Club’s Craig Butt spoke to her about how journalists can get started on Twitter, who the best people to follow are and how the microblogging service is changing the way we think about journalism.

Julie Posetti speaking at The Wheeler Centre (Photo: The Wheeler Centre)

How important is it for journalists to have a social media presence these days?

It’s become essential. I’m not alone in thinking that. It’s something the BBC’s head of global news, Peter Horrocks, said 18 months ago. This is no longer discretionary - journalists must know how to use these tools.

I think it’s essential to have a presence in the form of being able to use platforms like Twitter and Facebook to find information and distribute your content, but it is also essential to connect with audiences and to do that in a way that generates trust.

How can Twitter be used for newsgathering?

On Twitter you have the chance to monitor breaking news. Media organizations are tweeting about what’s happening, and so are sources who are in the street watching events unfold, talking about what they are seeing in front of them and how they feel about it. So it’s a way of monitoring what’s going on. But Twitter’s also a way of actively seeking new ideas, new voices and contributions from a broader audience.

So who would do you recommend journalists that are getting started on Twitter should follow?

I always get that question! I wrote a Twitter list, which is something that you can do on Twitter, in which I pulled together the top ten tweeters.

I asked my Twitter audience who they would identify and they came back with something like 200 responses with about 100 suggestions among them so I literally sat there with a pen and paper and very untechnologically ranked them according to the vote.

The list includes people like Mark Colvin from PM, blogger Grog’s Gamut, (ABC social media reporter) Latika Bourke, journalists, lawyers, academics and digital technologists. It’s a real mix of people.

For journalists I certainly recommend they start with people like Mark Colvin and Pollytics, a political economist who blogs with Crikey.

What is it about how Mark Colvin, Latika Bourke and Pollytics use Twitter that brings out the advantages of the service?

It’s all about interactivity. They respond when someone says something, they start a conversation and are willing to listen to the responses, they’re interested in what people are saying, they’re not doing it as an act of ego and they’re intrigued – certainly in the case of Mark Colvin - about what people have to say.

With Pollytics, he’s informative and he’s entertaining. For me, what’s interesting about his tweets is that he frequently obtains important background material and provides the context that journalists often miss.

And Latika, she’s prolific – she tweets a lot – and some people find that annoying, but other people find it engaging. She is certainly very responsive and I think that’s very important.

Does having a strong established social media presence make journalists valuable to their organization?

Definitely. You can see that in terms of the time and resources that mastheads like The New York Times put into Twitter and how the ABC hired Latika Bourke, who’s job it is to have a social media presence. Those journalistic actions are about building an individual audience but that audience is brought back constantly to the employers’ website and the employers’ programming, so the organizations benefit for the most part.

Are journalists tweeting under auspices of the organisation they work for or is there a separation there?

It’s still being worked out. Journalists who have been using social media for sometime talk about how they believe they have the right to their social networks. You’ll see them write that their tweets are representative of their opinions and not their employers. They will also try to sift out the information they are commenting on in a professional setting and the information they are perhaps commenting on off the job. It can become complicated and murky but it can be dealt with as audiences also mature in their understanding of social media.

There’s also the issue of journalists voicing opinions on Twitter, which some other journalists disapprove of – like when you’ve got people going “Gotcha, you said you would vote for a Carbon Tax, that means you’re biased, which means you can’t possibly be a journalist anymore.” But if you’ve made this point and you are actually a police reporter, what does is matter, ultimately?

This reframing of objectivity and other great tenets of journalism is happening in real-time.

Is Twitter a challenge to objectivity?

I don’t think Twitter is, what it encourages journalists to do is certainly creating opportunities for breaching what could quite strict interpretations of objectivity. I’ve seen journalists discussing the very nature of objectivity and having discussions about why we should adhere to it, trying to unpack it in that manner.

You’re writing your PhD thesis on the Twitterisation of journalism. What is the Twitterisation of journalism?

Through engagement with a platform like Twitter, journalists are changing their practices, journalism is becoming more openly reflective and the reporting processes are being discussed live on the platform. We’ve seen journalists cross traditional barriers that used to separate them from the audience and the barriers that separated one news organization from another. Journalists are discussing things with one another in public before stories go to print or are broadcast. There’s collaboration between journalists in a way I haven’t previously seen and through social networking there’s a text based version of the discussions that go on after work at the pub.

There are also issues around the key tenets of 20^th century journalism being redefined. That includes, importantly, objectivity, which has been challenged by twitter’s capacity to encourage instant sharing of facts and opinions. There are also issues like verification – how do you assess whether what’s being said and shared on Twitter is true? And it’s also about engagement and how important that it has been in the process of transforming journalism.

How do stories develop on Twitter, as opposed to stories in a print publication or radio news bulletin?

In some ways, similarly, in that the process starts with an idea or a tip. The difference is that the process is often public. So it could be something a journalist sees on a public platform and responds to on a public platform, seeking follow up comment or contact details. So that’s the kind of public, real-time, interactive display of what would go in a normal process of newsgathering and ultimately storytelling. But it’s the role of many more players in the audience in framing what that story is about and then sharing that information and reacting to it and correcting the record. It involves a lot more people in the process of journalism.

In their recent “10 Best Practices for Social Media”, the American Society of News Editors advised journalists should “Break news on your website, not on Twitter”. What do you think of this approach?

I think its ridiculous. Certainly, if a journalist has an exclusive and they want to keep a particular angle then it makes perfect sense to break the story elsewhere. You might surreptitiously use social media tools in the newsgathering process, but you’re likely to do a lot of it offline.

But if what you’re talking about is the daily bread and butter of news reporting, which involves attendance of news conferences and – frankly and sadly – reactions to media releases and events based reporting, then quite why it needs to get on a newspaper website first doesn’t make sense.

Is Twitter a good thing for journalism?

Definitely. It’s fascinating as a citizen, as an academic and as a journalist to watch Twitter progress. Despite all the risks and pitfalls that have well and truly been identified along the way, I think Twitter is an important breakthrough in terms of making journalism more social and accessible to a broader public.

Watch Julie Posetti's speech at the Wheeler Centre on making journalism social.