Social media involves sites like facebook, twitter, and myspace. These sites allow people to communicate with others all over the world instantaneously. Traditional media is still used as the average person's main media source, however, social media is changing everything as we know it.
In 208, when hurricane Hanna hit, reporters were able to tweet about what was happening to them at that exact moment. People were interested in those tweets because they could find out exactly where and when the hurricane hit and how bad the damage was.
This information was delivered faster than traditional media could have delivered it to the public; it takes time to first, find out the situation, send reporters to the scene and broadcast it to the public, or even write about it in the newspaper.
With the twitter updates, people were able to access the information right then and there as it was happening.
Writing on the web is a lot different than traditional news writing. Writing on the web is shorter, more concise, and more to the point. People have short attention spans and when they want to find out news from the web they want to be able to read it quickly. Not only is writing on the web shorter in general, but the paragraphs and sentences are also shorter.
In addition,on the web subheadings are used so that people can skip down to find the place where the specific information they want is.
For example, twitter updates can only have 160 characters. That means that your whole thought, or whole piece of information can only be 160 characters long so it needs to be terse and direct.
New media has had a huge influence on how people get their news today. People receive news and updates directly to their phone as soon as something gets updated. using twitter as an example again, as soon as someone you are following tweets, you can receive a notice to your phone with what their tweet said.
Also, with texting, information and pictures can be spread throughout an entire school within minutes. When there was a fight at one of our football games someone took a video of it and posted it to facebook and immediately everyone-other students, parents, teachers, the principle, even news stations-had seen it.
New media is changing everything about how news is submitted to the public. Even traditional news sources are using twitter and facebook accounts to spread information and stay updated in this new media craze.
"What was once the province of doorsteps and homepages is now about the hustle of networking, the savvy application of technology and the dark art of promotion and marketing. "
Traditional media sources are using new media sources to appeal to users and stay popular.
"Facebook pages have become a venue for news organizations and individual reporters to post links to stories and respond directly to comments and questions."
