BBC College of Journalism discusses a lively Twitter debate which took place at the weekend between Sky journalist Neal Mann and NPR’s social media strategist Andy Carvin. The blog attempts to move the debate on, looking at how journalism is changing as a result of social media.
On Friday, ‘mainstream’ media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah – Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate ‘today’ footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.
Was that a failure of mainstream media or social media? It was certainly a failure of journalism – and that’s the point: the differing strands of journalism and/or media are converging.