New generations of journalists are emerging. They may not have had any training in journalism. They are anyone with access to the Internet. That’s right you and I are all journalists.

Using social media sites like those of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is a part of every person’s repertoire. But social media sites are no longer only used to check up on exhibitionistic friends, or the site to watch crazy cat videos. Now, anyone with a Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube account can report on the events they witnessed. A simple 140-character “tweet” or 2-minute YouTube video clip can inform the people of events in countries all over the world.

According to a Wall Street Journal article Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant, inadvertently offered up live coverage of the death of Osama Bin Laden via Twitter.  The general public would have never learned of the unfiltered version of the story if Athar had not been inconspicuously tweeting away at his annoyance of all the sudden noise in the wee hours of the night.

“In terms of getting snippets from the ground of the action and opinions from actual people in the situation using social media is better,” Julia Dratel, University of Chicago student said. “They’re not filtered by media networks. They don’t have to report to any higher ups.”
Looking back at the revolutions taking place in Egypt, the Western world had little idea of the political upheaval that was taking place.  If it weren’t for a protesters who recorded videos of police brutality during the protests, and uploaded it onto YouTube than Westerners may have never found out about the revolution.

With social media there are no expectations for the person to be impartial

“I had friends studying abroad in Cairo [this past semester],” Dratel said. “It was difficult to ignore a status updates like ‘I just saw a riot.’”

Social media definitely enhanced the role of journalism because there is always people witness events and posting live tweets of the event. “It’s as if there’s reporters everywhere even though they’re not properly trained,” Craig Stone, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College said. Conversely, not all college students feel that social media sites are proper channels for getting any sources of news. “For ‘real news’ I would read the New York Times or Bloomberg News,” Ludovic Delmas, international student from Toulouse Business School in France said. Journalists do follow a code of ethics, and also have multiple resources to fact check their articles to ensure that what they’re putting out to the public is unaltered facts.

“Social media sites should only be used for checking up with friends,” Delmas said. “Whenever they [Facebook users] post status updates it’s normally their opinions or views on a subject. What I am looking for in news is a more neutral and broader perspective upon the events.” Social media is a place for being to be social on the Internet. It is considered more of a conversation rather than a source for news media. People can share their thoughts through 140-character updates as well as link to articles and videos. “With social media there are no expectations for the person to be impartial,” Dratel said.  “You’re getting both the good and bad sides to any event.”

Twitter is constructive to journalism immediately after an event occurs. However, the one tweet quickly leads to retweets that include people’s own opinions and jokes. Journalists take the information at hand and weed out the opinionated information and give validity through research. “The Journalists job is to recognize their own biases and work around it in a way that makes the news their putting out objective,” Stone said. “There is a balance between taking what people give you and then working with it to verify.”