As the title suggests, the combination of social media, social networks and social web can and should be fused together with journalism – whether that is text, audio, images or video. So what you may ask, what am I going to do about it?

Social journalism is about real relationships with readers which provide more engagement. The idea is to engage with an audience rather than to an audience. It will further the basic foundations of journalism by telling more compelling stories and the more people that we bring to our content then the better for our business.

There can be strong eco-systems behind the blogs. Tools such as Twitter publish out but email is more of an official means of communication. The speed of social journalism has the mainstream running scared but even big media wants to works with individuals.

The business model of journalism is failing rather than the production of journalism. There is nothing wrong with going directly to the person who knows what they are talking about rather than falling back to crowd sourcing all of the time.

Sharing the news gathering process with the audience can both help and deceive the audience, depending on who you are sharing with. Social journalism is not more authentic than traditional forms of journalism, rather more of a specific view on things.

Audience expectations need to be managed to ensure informed discussion, rather than ranting. A basic formula to follow should be to create, share and distribute. You can only create content once, but your brand gets amplified the more it is shared across the social web.

Responsible reporting includes providing the context which is the difference between just reporting and just doing journalism. Telling the truth is hard but not telling it is harder. It is the troubles that cause the rebels of the world, not the rebels causing the troubles.

There are many local news stories that don’t even make the local radio stations and local blogs are becoming more useful than traditional media. Some blogs are making money out of this production by providing newsgathering, documenting and including people’s emotion within stories.

Where things are all happening now

Some people are no longer using search and relying on social discovery, moving away from the mainstream media driving the social agenda. Social needs to be built into new business models and social discovery is a core traffic driving strategy.

The race for influence between brands and individuals has been replaced by the new ecology of news production and consumption. Those that understand the social element will tell better stories; increase engagement; distribute more content.

In the old days, journalists were diggers in an age of scarcity of news, now people are becoming managers of news mixing innovation with technology. Innovation is about changing the way we report – risk, collaboration and failure.

Stories can be a limiting way of explaining events that never stop happening but you can be sure that every event creates a community. By tapping into that community, the stories that come out will be far richer than some of the analysis that follows most events.

We should take the leap from being in the middle and being at the end as most mainstream media have been at the end whilst social journalism is somewhere in the middle. Social media doesn’t do justice to the way the world is opening up between closed organisations and open organisations, sometimes called mutual.

A social journalism model would consist of:

1. Reporters
2. Google translate
3. Live blogging
4. Twitter
5. Area blogs and commentary

It is important to be linked to, shared, and commented on to show there are different ways of doing news/journalism. If you are closed then you have to compete with the open way, the closed position attempts to fight for control. So let us commercial, editorial and technical people come together in our pursuit for a more social form of journalism.