News
Impact of Social Media on news and the journalist/PR-agency relationship
The ING Bank has conducted a survey among an international group of journalists and PR professionals where in the inluence of social media on fact-checking in news items has been reviewed.
The survey revealed that social media is increasingly being used by both journalists and PR-agencies but that the reliability of news items therefore can often be questioned by the lack of fact-checking and the rise of crowd-checking. Journalists tend to 'go with the flow' as they spot much of their inspiration online which is based on peer-to-peer information. They have stated that they consider consumer opinions to be more reliable than a statement by an organisation. This has resulted in only 20% of the journalists fact-checking their information before publishing.
Another finding of the survey is that Dutch PR-agencies in general are lagging behind compared to international counterparts. In The Netherlands the focus lies on sending out the information rather than being devoted to dialogue and direct contact with journalists and consumers via social media. Well, unnecessary to say that we feel the exception to the rule on this finding!
As a result of this more 'user generated content' the ING expects that journalism will in the future be driven more by clicks and views rather than by content as this is already out there in different sorts. For PR-agencies it is expected that there will be more direct contact witht the consumer and increasingly less involvement of journalists.
Click here to read the full article by ING.
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