Press Gazette: How should journalists use social media material?
It’s interesting this discussion is starting now. I told my students in a lecture yesterday that there’s going to be more of this – using MySpace, Facebook, etc as news sources. Reporters are now routinely checking MySpace pages for personal information about people who are in the news.
I think we should all be careful about what kind of trails we leave in cyberspace, nothing is really private anymore.
Martin Stabe’s blog (above) gives more details on a recent British case and of course it has become a staple of the Virginia Tech coverage.
Meanwhile, MySpace is also launching a news aggregation service. Of course its links with the Murdoch empire – MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive – will mean it is never short of a good story, particularly if it favours Mr Murdoch’s viewpoints. Is this a sneaky way of turning young Americans into Republicans, and the rest of the world is just collateral damage?
Ethical Martini 