Tv Newsroom Focus In On Social Media

With the rise of the social media, some may consider the resources offered by the virtual community are a danger to those in television. Not only are individuals using social media at home, but professional such as newscasters, are beginning to utilize these virtual resources more and more. A recent study shows 77% of newsroom use networking sites such as Twitter, 35 % of those using the site at least once a day.

Twitter, which started out as a site on which people could "tweet" what they are doing, is gaining much popularity because of its ability to broadcast news a second after the event occur. Newsrooms find social media particularly relevant because not only because of the textual information but because of photos and visual data. News outlets are starting to extract photos from social media sites and crowdsource them, especially photos of natural disasters that occurred halfway across the world (real footage of tsunamis and earthquakes are hard to obtain without actually being there). 27% of tv stations are also using Twitter and Facebook to obtain more information on certain topics. In addition, these stations are using mobile devices to deliver information.