Through a couple of my internships, I've been given the opportunities to engage in social media on behalf of entertainment companies. In both cases, we used Twitter as a marketing, branding, and outreach tool. But I never considered that for news organizations, using Twitter to market themselves, may actually pose a problem. Although I follow plenty of news outlets on Twitter, rarely, if ever, do I stop to truly think about the way they're tweeting - rather, I just consume the news that they release.
Recently, Mashable wrote about a study done by The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, which revealed that over 90% of the time, news outlets tweet a link to their own website. The conclusion here, is that news organizations and journalists are using Twitter solely to promote themselves, instead of tweeting in the interest of completely informing the public. It appears that it is rare to find a news tweet that links to another organization/source. Are news outlets being selfish, and depriving followers of all potential resources?
"News organizations use Twitter mostly to promote their own stories. Sharing of other content and engagement with readers is “rare,” according to a new study."The study suggested that while the initial concern with Twitter was to build your own following, "Now, the idea is that being a service — of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else — carries more weight". Are mainstream news organizations failing in their duty to fully inform the public by refusing to direct their followers to other sources as well as their own? By linking mostly to their own sites, are these outlets engaging in unethical marketing/promotion tactics?
Check out the full article here. It's an interesting analysis of "Twitter intentions", and I'm curious as to what you all think of it.
I don't think it's unethical to have a news organization only tweet about their own news. It's self-promotion, and social media facilitates that. Every company has a Facebook and Twitter page to promote themselves. They use these tools to reach people and expose them to their product. In this case, expose them to their news. Which isn't a bad thing. It may be seen as one-sided or biased to point followers only in their direction, but what's the real harm in that? An educated person would read not only their news story but another from another publication, as well.
ReplyDeleteRachelle has a good point. If the effect of concentrating on your own product would merely be a delayed awareness of some bit of news, hard to see any real damage. It's hard to imagine someone whose only news source (let us say) is the NYTimes tweetstream. If a news organization writes about a topic using info from another news organization, of course the news writer should credit that org in the story.
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