There's no doubt that social media has made its mark on journalism. Just think of the way that the news of Steve Jobs' death spread rapidly around the world.

These changes haven't just changed the way we read newspapers. They've also profoundly altered our relationship with television.

This was the subject of a talk given by Mike Proulx, co-author of the book Social TV, at "Les Nouvelle Pratiques du Journalisme" conference at Sciences Po, Paris, hosted in collaboration with Columbia Journalism School.

Proulx listed the four areas of broadcast news that have been affected by Twitter.

Breaking news.

All sorts of news is broken now on Twitter, from the earthquake on the US East Coast this August, to the fact that Billy Crystal was to replace Eddie Murphy as the host of this year's Oscars. The fact that news breaks on Twitter profoundly affects the way journalists work: many reporters monitor trending topics on to see what's happening, for example. They also mine social networks for information, pictures and videos about new stories. The famous photo of the jet which landed in the Hudson River was originally a twitpic.

Finding sources.

The Associate Press caused a stir in the media community when it scolded employees on Wednesday for having tweeted abut the arrests of one AP staffer and photojournalist at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York - before the news reached the official AP news wire.

Staff were told in a high priority memo which, according to NYMag, said "we've had a breakdown in staff sticking to policies around social media and everyone needs to get with their folks now to tell them to knock it off".

The AP's social media handbook, which acts an employee's bible for the use of Twitter and Facebook, is very clear that journalists should not 'scoop the wire', so to speak.

This type of social media restriction is common practice for major news wires, Reuters also has a similar guidelines. From a business perspective, it makes sense to stop employees beating the wire - what good is a news wire if the information on it is old news?

It's a matter of fact that Twitter has become part of the regular news workflow. And this is also the case for mainstream media outlets.

But how do they really use it? And how often? What's their underlying strategy? Is Twitter used by traditional media as a self-promotional channel for their own links or has it become a real, independent reporting tool?

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs answered these and other questions in a study that analysed the relationship between 13 major U.S. news outlets and Twitter.

It emerged from the study that news organizations mainly use Twitter for auto-referral. In fact, their use is primarily limited to disseminating their own material, rather than developing real engagement with followers or adding to the general debate by sharing external content.

The research examined more than 3,600 tweets over the course of a typical news week (February 14th - 20th 2011). It looked at tweets from each outlet's main newsroom Twitter account, as well as tweets by journalists working for these outlets. The study analysed both reporters with the largest number of followers and niche reporters. In order to observe how niche reporters use Twitter, the researchers examined a health reporter at each organization, as, according to the study, health was one of the most consistent beats across these news sites.

Is this little button going to turn your social media strategy upside down?

The 'subscribe' button will shortly begin appearing on Facebook profiles the world over, allowing users to view status updates, designated 'public', even if they are not Facebook 'friends' with that person.

How will this affect journalists? Potentially, it could be quite significant.

The 'subscribe' button is part of Facebook's efforts to include a wider range of features in order to compete with other social networks, primarily Twitter and Google+. The Subscribe button allows users to hear from public figures and others that they do no know personally. When someone subscribes to a profile, status updates marked 'public' from that profile will appear in the newsfeed of the subscriber.

Obviously, this quick, public sharing of information in a few hundred characters makes Facebook more similar to Twitter. Particularly as all Facebook status updates can now be shared directly to twitter.