BBC to appoint social media editor

Posted by Jennifer Lush on October 20, 2009 at 11:56 AM

The BBC is creating a new 'social media editor' position, the Guardian is reporting, amidst growing interest in the value of web services such as Twitter and Facebook to news publications. The BBC's decision comes as part of a wider campaign announced last month, designed to relaunch its websites with a greater social media focus.

"Like a lot of other news organisations, we are at the beginning of something very exciting, " said Nic Newman, the BBC's future media and technology controller, journalism. "We recognise social media plays an important part. With the new position we are co-ordinating best practice. We think that the decision to appoint a social media editor is the best way to understand what works."

The job requires the appointed editor to "help the organisation to learn how to explore and navigate in social media," rather than soley scan all websites looking for stories. The approach is different to that taken by Sky News earlier this year when it assigned Ruth Barnett as 'Twitter correspondent'. An internal email explained that as "the phenomenon of Twitter to continues to explode", the online team will have one of its employees scouring Twitter for stories, thereby harnessing its "power as a newsgathering tool".

The role was repsonded to with cynicism, as Guardian writer and keen Twitterer/Tweeter Jemima Kiss said that the time that such social media sites, "should be a tool that any forward-thinking journalist tries out, learns and then incorporates into their newsgathering".

Similarly, The New York Times named Jennifer Preston as its social media editor in May, stating she would concentrate "full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers."

Newman emphasised that the BBC's intentions were altogether different: "We are trying to facilitate to change the BBC, and not putting it all on one person," he said, continuing on to say that all journalists are encouraged to scan such sites. "This can't be all done by one editor."

Newman continued to say that the journalistic capabilities of social media were still widely unknown and that the BBC's decision to employ an editor to monitor this was key to better understanding the medium: "We don't know exactly what works out. What guidelines does a news organisation need? What is the best way for a journalist to present yourself? What is the thing you watch out for? To reach out to your viewer with social media is a way of taking your audience seriously, and that is very important for the BBC".

The news comes following a study released by online ad network Chitika yesterday, confirming that Twitter users, specifically, are keen consumers of news. The study sugegsted that the site's distinct ability to receive new instantaneously, "from being the first to publish pictures of a Turkish Airlines' plane crash to the social network's breaking of US Airways Flight 1549's dramatic crash into the Hudson River earlier this year... has made it out to be the bleeding edge of all news." The usefulness of such an immediate service is obvious to news publications, as Guardian blogger Stephen Armstrong writes: you essentially have free 24-hour newsgathering foreign correspondents. What is slightly more challenging, however, is trying to control such an onslaught of information, and it makes sense that many organisations are now looking into creating new roles to deal with this aspect specifically.

Source: Guardian