For our final online lecture, City’s new media guru Chris Brauer put on a roundtable discussion featuring an array of social media stars.
There were some interesting exchanges, but the most contentious points were saved for the bonus topic at the end – ‘What tips would you give these trainee journalists?’
Writer Anthony Thornton waded in first. He argued that this was the ‘best ever’ time to embark on a career in journalism. With the right skills any one of us could make a good living out of social media, he said.
His sunny outlook was a hard sell in a room full of soon-to-be unemployed journalists. But his theory was certainly appealing – young journalists have never had such a wealth of technology at their disposal for telling stories in a range of compelling ways. During our newspaper production fortnight at City we have been experimenting with multimedia – you can check out some of our audio, video and interactive maps at Hackney Post and Islington Now.
Anthony argued that with these basic multimedia skills we all had the potential to become the next Rafat Ali or Perez Hilton. The rest of the panel agreed and called on us all to blog, tweet and broadcast like crazy.
I’m sure they were right about the importance of social media. But with the best will in the world we’re not all going to be the next Perez Hilton. WordPress informs me that 45,400,292 words have been published today on WordPress blogs. That translates into an awful lot of commentators. Technorati has counted 133 million blogs and that’s just the ones they’ve been bothered to index.
Presumably only a tiny fraction of these bloggers are actually making a living out of blogging. There are of course a range of other factors behind blogs. For some blogging is an extension of their CV. For others it is all about connecting with an audience and writing about something they feel passionate about.
But it’s a safe bet that every one of these bloggers would like a larger audience.
This is especially true of social media ‘stars’. The more time you invest in your online presence, the better payoff you expect in terms of page hits and followers.
Top bloggers Rafat Ali and Perez Hilton
At the roundtable event, new media darling Jemima Kiss gushed about how ‘fabulous’ Twitter was. But then she would say that – her success is built on having a large crowd of fans and followers!
Social media seems to work a bit like a pyramid scheme. It is in the interests of everyone involved to suck more people in.
Photos by khrawlings, Mike Macadaan and Rex Hammock.
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