This morning’s presentation by Robin Phillips on social networking’s effect on journalism truly cinched my reason for being here. Robin is the Web Managing Editor at the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.
I was a skeptic of social media prior to my visit to the Cronkite School. I had regarded most sites as giant warehouses of social minutiae, none of which I had the time, energy, or desire to post or follow.
Robin, coupled with my tweeting experience here, changed my mind.
In her presentation, she not only shared a website, personalizemedia.com that chronicles the amount of use each social site receives in a given amount of time, but also illustrated the benefits of social media in “doing journalism": connecting with people, sources, and colleagues; finding people; driving traffic to content; improving writing, and crowd sourcing-- or tapping the masses for valuable information.
Apprehensive to share how much time a day she spends on “tweeting,” she did divulge that Twitter has an immense impact on her work and insight.
Why?
That’s the way to reach most people, she said.
After all, in the time it took me to write this post (802 seconds), 8,714 new members joined Facebook; 738 members joined LinkedIn; 8, 197 blogs were posted; 6, 995,ooo comments were put on Facebook,; 875,000 Tweets were posted; 817,000 people joined Twitter, and 609 iPads were sold.
I could barely keep up.
Why wouldn’t I use Social networking?
Cindy Hogentogler
Central York High School
York,Pa.
I keep a Facebook for my class and love it. However, I had to have a extensive talk with my students about being held accountable for what they say on the page.
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