Collaborative News Reporting

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We all have at least one social media platform that we use on a regular basis to stay connected to family, friends, and news that affects us.  Our dependence on social media to fulfill our needs has created a vacuum of sorts forcing traditional media outlets to adapt as new forms of news reporting have begun sprouting.  If you go to any major news website you will see links for multiple social media sites as well as links for what is known as ireporting.  Ireporting is a unique way for individuals to participate and provide a first hand knowledge on a developing news story.  This has become a creative and popular method when reporting on breaking news because it allows journalists to write a report and be provide supplemental information from eyewitnesses.  This collaborative format allowed the conversation to become livelier and has given individuals an opportunity that before the explosion of social media would not have existed. Nothing proves this more then the use of social media applications by protestors during the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto (Poell, T. and Borra, E. 2012).  Protestors utilized sites such as Twitter, Flickr and Youtube to report on the protest and provide a first hand account of the events as they were happening. The use of social media has allowed the first person reporting style to evolve and it has become a little less confirmative.  It has become a much more collaborative environment and the news is evolving to include news that the audience wants to engage in. 

Social media has given us the opportunity to ask for what we want and if it does not exist then we can create it.  No longer are we forced to accept the news as is, we can no collaborate and participate in the creation of the news without being a journalist.  This has changed the news that we consider to be breaking news and it also changes the level of involvement.  Thanks to Twitter we can now trend a news story almost instantly and we can all participate in a discussion about the story. In her video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukz1HaHJrGI, Farai Chideya discusses participatory journalism and how it is changing the way we write and report the news.  Our needs have changed and we are gathering much of our news through social media and this has dictated the way journalists report the news.  In order to remain relevant they must collaborate with their audience as well as turn to social media to report the news. 

Poell, T. and Borra, E. (2012). Twitter, YouTube, Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: The social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Journalism, 13(6). Sagepub.com