Since the advent of the social media, journalism has become easy and inclusive to both who studied the course and those who studied a different course. Journalism has been brought to individual level that anybody can be a reporter provided you have an internet enabled smartphone. You can capture the scene of an event which you witnessed and shared it on the internet for people to see via facebook and other social media platforms. Getting information these days has been made easy, just get a smartphone that can use the internet and you’re there.
More and more reporters are using facebook in journalism as a way of connecting with sources and developing ideas for articles. Many news media platform today all over the world now source some of their information from social media which facebook is happens to the most visited. This platform has so many intriguing features that can keep users entertained and busy unlike the news media which specialize predominantly on dissemination of news. Facebook and other counterpart platforms have room for chat where users engage in conversations and many other awesome features like uploading of pictures and videos, it’s a complex platform where you can get almost all you need to get information and be entertainment.
In order to throw light on the usefulness and importance of facebook, we at Olainfo have compiled a list of five ways you can use facebook in journalism.
- Find Ideas: as a journalist, you can use facebook to get ideas for articles as you monitor what people are talking about on the platform. Or ask your facebook friends what they’re interested in reading about. Chances are if people are talking about something on facebook, they’ll probably interested in reading more of it. You can see a post about some tourist attraction scenes which is yet to be discovered by people, tap the information, make story from it and publish it, this alone will help you in journalism journey.
- Find Sources for Articles: are you doing an article on the rising cost of a gallon of kerosene? Just share the word on facebook, make a post with it and watch how people will contribute by commenting on the post. From here, you can find enough information to create your article. You can even see someone who might be a dealer of substance on the platform which will boost the quality of your article.
- Network with People and Groups You Join: if your journalism specializes on local music scene, entertainment or celebrity news, you can look out information from their pages and create your news content. This is how many bloggers all over the world today source their news.
- Conduct Interviews: facebook can be a great way to set up and conduct interviews. You can just send a message to the person you want to make enquiry from via the chat room and the interview starts in as much as the interviewee grant you the permission to carry it out. However, be sure the person is aware of the interview because you wouldn’t want to mislead a source. It’s part of the ethics of journalism to inform your supposed interviewee before conducting such exercise to avoid being sued to court for failure to seek consent.
- Promote Your Articles: promotion of article post these days on facebook has some huge advantages, once your article is promoted, it will get to large audience who can participate in the comment session and share their own knowledge on the subject of your article. Just post a link to it on facebook and use the feedback you get to generate more ideas for your publictions.
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