The threat of “Social News”

I manage a small website for freeski news (Raiders.ch). During the last couple of years new websites have popped up and are starting to fight for our market share. The risk of establishing something in the Internet is, that there are as good as no market entry barriers. Everyone can establish their own blog with no programming skills and practically no money.

No in the past we’ve worked as every news magazine would work. Have your journalists out on the field and get them to write about what is happening. With the uprise of social media new forms of journalism are being applied. With live streaming and threw twitter or Facebook status updates, no more field presence is actually needed anymore. Journalist (as myself I have to admit) can stay in front of the computer and follow status updates and streaming coverage. Since I don’t have to run from a venue to the next internet connection, also the circulation of news gets way faster. This again forces all the competitors fighting for market share to be the fastest, when news hits.

Here is a nice example I could show you from our market share. Currently the X Games in Europe are taking place in Tignes, France. This is one of the most important competitions for the freestyle sport section and journalist around the world are following this event. This morning the womens slopestyle finals took place. Only five minutes after the finals I had several feeds in my facebook account (The first feeds came in only seconds after the ranking was announced). Look at these posts. Notice: These are only the feeds of websites that compete for the same market area as we do, ergo: Switzerland

So you can see. Nine post in only around three minutes and this is only a small section of all the media reporting from the event.

One point, that I would like to highlight is, that news sites are no longer bound to their journalists and can take information from where ever they can find it. The competition is usually one of the best news sources around and with twitter and Facebook the advantage of time no longer exists.

This circumstance also Reuters must have noticed and thanks to the article on mashable, we can see that news agencies are the ones most suffering from this threat. The importance of social media and the news cycle has become so evident, that Reuters has included a set of social media guidelines in their Handbook of Journalism.They advice Journalist not to publish any hard news via twitter. “As with blogging within Reuters News, you should make sure that if you have hard news content that it is broken first via the wire. Don’t scoop the wire. (…)”.

Also Reuters sees a the risks microblogging can have. Since usually news on twitter or facebook is not re-read, Reuters can not control the content of any “tweets” of their journalists, what could have an impact on their reputation.  ” (…) Be aware, however, that Reuters Twitter streams will and must be reviewed by an editor – not necessarily in real time or before publication, but eventually and regularly.”
So the main question that comes up is, will news agencies still be important in the future? Now that practically everyone can be a journalist.