After the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s obvious that social networking platforms play a big roll in the news business.
Twitter hit a record high of 5,000 Tweets per second that evening.
Just an hour before President Obama’s address to the nation, the news was out: Osama bin Laden. Dead.
Sorry Mr. President. We beat ya to the punch.
But it all started with a guy, Sohaib Athar, who unknowingly live blogged the raid at the compound where bin Laden was hiding.
Ather, more popularly known as @ReallyVirtual, had less than 800 Twitter followers as of Saturday, but that number peaked well above 100,000 this week.
Lesson learned: if you want followers, don’t Tweet about your latest meal. Share something big.
As TV viewership declines, stations are desperate to find ways to push ahead of the race.
Here in Cleveland, I’m proud to say Fox 8 is pushing that envelope.
We spotlight our Facebook Fans every day and through amazing giveaways and interactive discussions, we’ve topped out other local TV stations across the country with our fans.
Through the use of social-networking platforms, we are able to find ways to integrate the next greatest love: mobile devices and the Internet into our broadcasts.
My, have times changed.
In 2004, I remember reporting about some strange-named website, “Facebook.” I made a call to some kid with an equally strange name, “Zuckerberg.”
Nobody at K-State knew what it was about. Not many seem to care.
But months later, that attitude in Manhattan changed.
In its infancy, Facebook was an exclusive club. It was a society strictly for college kids. We could find our classmates and friends. It was a safe, secret place. Nobody had access to it, not even our parents.
Of course, things changed. The site evolved.
Now, 600 million users–parents included–around the world are a part of the social phenomenon, where you can play games, remember birthdays, share pictures and do basic things… like e-mail.
It’s amazing to see how in seven short years, a platform can change so much–and in short–change the way how we connect with the world.
Without social networking, I guess things would have been different that night.
We may have had to stick around for that hour and learn the news from the President himself.
Yeah, yeah. I’m always waiting on the fringe to crab about something. Some things don’t change.
The only problem with all this NOW NOW NOW GIMME GIMME is that it is NOW but it’s not necessarily right.
The night of the attack we had every internet commando, former mall guard and media gas bag yanking speculation out of thin air. Then the yabbering folks at the national outlets got on and “reported” (based on what?) that the attacks were carried out:
By drones (no)
By bombers (no)
Then after the President’s address came “Nonsense, Part Deux (Nonsense Harder!)” about shackled, shrieking women being gunned down as human shields and who was shooting and who was not and blah, blah, blah, blah until there was so much misinformation going around that it’s incorporation into recorded and remembered history is inevitable.
I’m not saying that social media doesn’t have its uses. There IS information that can be sifted out of the septic tank of internet sludge. But that night was a bad example of how the urge to “report something, ANYTHING” can really screw up the honest narrative. If we screw it up bad enough then the news winds up becoming the news, and isn’t that what we’re supposed to avoid at all cost?