Interchange Project

Despite using social media personally, many college journalism students fail to understand its journalism uses

MediaShift has a fascinating post on how, despite embracing social media in their personal lives, many college journalism students fail to see its power for journalism:

Despite all the time they spend online, they’re behind the curve in terms of understanding the journalistic potential of social media. In fact, some of them are reluctant to recognize the connection between legacy media and web 2.0, as if in doing so, they’d be assuming a power best left to professionals.

When our recent crop of digital journalism students were asked to create their own journalistic blogs and market their content through social media, they were uncomfortable. Although they habitually post to Facebook, the thought of actually reporting on a topic and putting their work into the public domain as journalism, versus a personal narrative of candid pictures and random Friday night ephemera, was scary.

Some of the most stuck-in-the-past journalists are students and recent grads. These students and recent grads idolize the glory days of newspapers and people like Woodward and Bernstein. Those two did great work not because of the printed page, but because they were hardworking journalists determined to get a story. Young journalists should copy that spirit, not the medium those giants found success in four decades ago.

Episode 4: OK, so Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr walk into a bar…

We start off the show talking about the last space shuttle launch ever. EVAR.

It’s a sad way to start the show, and we’re both NASA geeks. But space flight is a really big society and technology topic, and I noticed most my coworkers watching the launch live. What was different is that both of us watched the launch live and shared our experience over Twitter and Google+.

It was a powerful cultural moment.

We also discuss the implications of trying to sell people on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) educations and careers, while also grounding the greatest STEM achievement ever.

We discuss again how Facebook is at its best when you don’t need filters, and how Google+ may have come into being because there is such a strong need for filtering and granularity. Facebook has led to a lot of awkward situations that Google+ is built to avoid.

Somewhere in our whole discussion of Facebook and Googe+, we come to realize that Google+ is the offspring of a Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr threesome. We’re not convinced we like this mental image.

And then we discuss how peer review is archaic. How can the Internet change peer review, and how would Jeremy like to share his research?

Listen to this week’s podcast:

Download the MP3

Show notes:

• Google+ is the social wrapper around Google’s other products — We further discuss our thoughts on Google+, and we have a lot.
• Facebook was never a big geek site (Google+ needs to pass more than the geek test) — Facebook became popular because it appealed to geeks and non-geeks alike. Can Google+ do that too?
• PressForward: An attempt to rethink peer review for a new media age — An attempt to make peer review modern.