Sources in the Social Media Age
Saturday, March 9
9:30AM – 10:30AM
Austin Convention Center, Room 12AB
The use of social media as a source has become a massive trend. In the United States 55 percent of journalists use platforms like Twitter and Facebook as sources, 75 percent use them in the UK. Although this trend has been examined from several different angles in the past, Joe Ciarallo, along with his fellow panelists don’t want to host just another social journalist panel. They want to look deeper into the evolving relationship between sources and journalists that has been influenced by these social media tools and practices.
“Now that everyone can publish their world with one click, it is changing the relationship between sources, the media and the public,” explained Ciarallo. “Everything is blurring together and we want to look at how journalists and sources are adapting.”
Ciarallo, who has 8 years of experience in public relations, communications and social media is Senior Director of PR at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The panel will also include Edmund Lee, Media Reporter at Bloomberg News, Peter Kafka, Senior Editor at All Things Digital and Greg Galant CEO of Muck Rack, an online resource allowing people to find what sources journalists are using to communicate.
The panelists all reside in the greater NY area and have had this and similar conversations in the past. “I thought it would be interesting to have two respected journalists who are active on twitter and engaging with both readers and sources,” said Ciarallo. “We wanted to be able to explore what types of media different journalists are covering and using as sources.”
With hopes to provide real world examples from both the source side and the expert side, the panelists want to provide information for anyone interested in journalism and the social media world. People inside and outside the field can learn how they can connect with journalists using social channels and journalists can learn how reporters are breaking news using social media and how this plays a key role in helping them to beat out their competition.
