Social media Series: The people formerly known as the audience | The Economist

via economist.com

Excerpt:

"....Surveys in Britain and America suggest that 7-9% of the population use Twitter, compared with almost 50% for Facebook. But Twitter users are the “influencers”, says Nic Newman, former head of future media at the BBC and now a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. “The audience isn’t on Twitter, but the news is on Twitter,” says Mr Jones.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network..."

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