The new realities of a society increasingly getting its news from the social media were discussed yesterday at a public lecture by Charles Beckett, a founding director of a journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics.
The very well attended lecture was organised by The Strickland Foundation.
Prof Beckett compared the old media – television, radio and newspapers - to the ticket office at the Hypogeum. “New media got rid of the gate keeper,” he said.
The social media, he explained, was the biggest revolution since the invention of the printing press.
The impact had its downside: newspaper revenues around the world in these last 10 years had gone down drastically.
He cited The Guardian, the British national newspaper, as an example. “It has a relatively small circulation of around 200,000 but online it gets some 10 million readers ... because it opened itself up to all forms of social media,” he said.
Although it gained readers, The Guardian was losing a lot of money. However, it was now in the process of generating money through other unexpected sources: cookery classes, journalism courses and one of the UK’s most popular dating sites.
Social media had also marked the era of citizen journalism, Prof Beckett said. Through social media channels, readers were collaborating and enriching content. Typical examples were the start of the Syria revolution and the Arab spring. “Mainstream media could not be present in any way – and citizen media made it to the main news channels,” he said.
He also mentioned little Martha Payne – the young school girl in the UK who blogged about her school dinners. “When the local council banned Martha from blogging, Twitter went crazy and by the evening she was back online.”
One of the direct results of social media was the loss of privacy, he said. “It’s like living in a glass room ... actions are more transparent,” he said.
As for the future, he said most national media houses in the UK had a social media desk. “If you can’t take the heat from social media, then you need to need to get out of the kitchen”.
Journalism had to be social if it was to survive and thrive, he said. Also: “Journalist have to stop pretending to be pure and neutral and bloodless and unbiased.” He urged journalists to be “more honest about who they are”.