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That could have been the title of the new media and social media workshop we ran in May 2014 at the headquarters of Morocco's state-run Maghreb Arabe Presse (MAP) news agency.
That could have been the title of the new media and social media workshop we ran in May 2014 at the headquarters of Morocco's state-run Maghreb Arabe Presse (MAP) news agency.
The journalists attending had backgrounds ranging from graphics to television and written news. One thing they had in common was that while they were all avid Facebook users, they had yet to take advantage of the impact of social media on journalism.
Yes, they viewed it as a way of sending out stories. Like broadcast.
What we learnt together was that it's becoming increasingly difficult to cover news competently without using social media in a multitude of ways.
It's about following news by creating a solid Twitter feed and filling your profile up with tweets from the organizations you want to monitor. It's about making contact with your sources, who - more often than not these days, from analysts to politicians - tweet. It's also, crucially, about letting your readers come back to you with their views and building a discussion forum around what you cover. It's even about being open to re-tweeting interesting content from other organisations as you seek to curate a community online. And it’s about getting your followers to share your output with their followers and friends.
It can be a way of finding contacts, witnesses or even just ideas for a particular story.
After a first day of analyzing new media outlets and aggregators – including Morocco’s own yabiladi.com – we explored, thanks to research we'd found through LinkedIn for Journalists, how social media gets used by reporters. This included checking for breaking news and monitoring the competition. We also looked at which social networks get used most; forget thinking about journalists today as the YouTube generation, Twitter has more than twice the number of "regular users" among US journalists.
On the second day we looked specifically at Twitter, helped the attendees to subscribe and open accounts and ended the day with them having tweeted, retweeted and sent shortened links to their followers on topics of interest. Co-trainer Gabriela Matthews then helped them to find and resize pictures and to better-understand how she uses Twitter in the field as a Reuters TV reporter, where she is often thrown into breaking stories and needs to get her head around them and find sources on the fly.
On the last day, we looked together at pitfalls, hoaxes and ethics.
By the end of the workshop all attending had both an understanding of how flexible - and essential - social media is in covering news today and had working Twitter accounts they can now use to explore and exploit this!
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