How I'm using social media to find news, report news and read news

If you add up the circulation of all the major metro tabloids (Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg), all the daily broadsheets (London, Kingston, Peterborough, etc.) and all the weeklies that Quebecor owns, the stuff I write for my mainstream media organization, Sun Media/QMI Agency, you end up with a number larger than 6 million. And that's just circulation. Readership will always be a bigger number than circulation as people tend to pass the paper they get around to others in their household so now we're talking a potential readership of, I'd guess, at least 7 million.

I have, at last count, a blog readership of about 90,000 a month, just under 4,000 Twitter followers, about 1,100 Facebook friends, and 38 Google Buzz followers. And I've just jumped on Tumblr. (Feel free to follow me there). I've toyed with StumbleUpon, Reddit, and other social media sites but, while they might be for you, they aren't for me. (Former colleague Kirk LaPointe is big on FourSquare but I haven't yet started fiddling seriously there.)

So a potential readership measured in the millions on that old mainstream media and a readership measured (if I'm really lucky) in the thousands and yet, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time creating content or monitoring content for that tiny social media audience rather than spend my time working exclusively for that mainstream media audience. I was challenged, at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference in Montreal this spring, by some about the time I was spending/wasting on social media. Why not use that time to make one more phone call? To track down another source? Fair points. (Complicated answer to those questions poorly summed up by saying: It's not either/or and print reporters tend to over-interview and over-research if you ask me …) And yet, as I mentioned, I've just decided to carve yet more “wasted” time out of my day to try out Tumblr. Why?

I ought to answer that question in a more fulsome way but, in the meantime, some quick notes about how I'm using my social media toolbox as both a newsgatherer and a news reporter:

• First principles, Part 1: My work for Sun Media (and before that, Canwest, and before that, CTV, and before that, The Globe and Mail, National Post, etc.) pays the mortgage. Everything I'm doing on my blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. is done with an eye towards helping me be better at the work that pays the bills.
• First principles, Part 2: A lot of people use social media to connect with family, friends, etc. Not me. I'm all business. I'm not using these tools to post pictures of the kids or what I did on my summer vacation. Part of my rationale for this is a concern for the privacy of my family but mostly it's because I believe people I have never met are not much interested in my personal life but there's a good chance they might be interested in some of the things I see and learn in my professional life. Social media, just like my mainstream media work, lets me tell people about the things I see and learn in my professional life.
• The Blog: I've been blogging since 2002 and I'd keep blogging even if no one was reading it. Blogging, for me, is like a giant, searcheable notepad. It's a place to dump notes and other bits that I might need again later in my reporting. It's also a space to talk about some of the 'craft' issues, like this, and that, I think, helps develop credibility and trust with readers/viewers which supports First Principle 1. Plus, this blog is what passes, I suppose, for long-form social media. NYU prof/media critic Jay Rosen and I had an exchange back in 2005 about why I blog. My answers, five years later, still feel about right.
• Twitter : Chief downside to Twitter – 140 characters and that's it. Chief upside to Twitter – 140 characters and that's it. Twitter, for me, is the all-news channel of my social media universe. As a publisher/content creator, I use it to try to be “first with the news” in much the same way that I did when I was with CTV's Parliamentary Bureau. But if I had some news while at CTV, I'd have to phone up the News Channel assignment desk, tell them what I have, arrange to get an anchor in the chair, write up an anchor intro, get a camera guy to light me up in the Ottawa studio, hook up the audio gear, open up a line to the Toronto studio and then, likely after the next commercial break, I'd get on TV with the “breaking news”. That could take 20 minutes or more. On Twitter, I (and many other print journalists on Parliament Hill) are out and running with whatever news is happening immediately and, by the time the news networks get to it, it's old. (And here's some perspective by the way: If you added up the Twitter audience of me, the Star's Susan Delacourt, and CBC's Kady O'Malley, you have about 12,000 people. The average audience for the all-news channels of CBC and CTV can drop as low as 15,000 and rarely gets much above 50,000 at any point during a regular news day.) Being first with breaking news supports the goal of First Principle 1.
• Facebook: The blog, Twitter, and Google's Buzz are great tools because search engines index them and that means I can use them to find stuff I wrote ages ago and so can anyone else. Facebook I find less useful because I can't find stuff as easily. And yet, there's no denying, that Facebook is very popular and there's an audience of sorts out there. Except for photographs, I rarely post new or original content first at Facebook. Instead, I use Facebook mostly as a distribution platform to point my friends to the new or original content in my newspapers, on my blog, or on Twitter and Buzz.
• Google Buzz: My use of Google Buzz is mostly as an extension of my use of Google Reader, my preferred RSS client. Like most reporters, I tend to read a lot of stuff and, back in the old days, you'd physically cut out with scissors the interesting bits you wanted to keep for later and then put it in a physical file folder. Now, I just highlight and add it to Google Buzz. Easier than scissors and searcheable! I've set up by Buzz account so that stuff I clip and post to my Buzz account will get sent to my Twitter feed. So, like Facebook, I'm not creating new or original content here but if you're interested in seeing what I find interesting when I'm reading, then that's what my Buzz account is for.
• Tumblr: So now we come to Tumblr. How am I going to use this service to support First Principle 1? Remember: New and original content I create goes to the newspapers; some goes to the blog; lots of tidbits go to Twitter; and pics end up on Facebook. The blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz are also excellent distribution platforms to drive traffic back to the real important stuff I'm doing for Sun Media. Where will Tumblr fit in that ecosystem? As a newsgatherer, I'll use Tumblr to follow other Tumblr users that are important to my professional life — politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, etc. As a content creator, I'll probably re-purpose/re-create content I've created first for other platforms. Where I see Tumblr having a unique role (and remember: I've had a Tumblr blog for all of about an hour now) is in follower/user-generated content. Tumblr has a neat “Ask Me Anything” feature and a neat “Submit” feature. I hope my readers/followers jump in and use these features to point me at ideas and events I might not have otherwise thought to get involved with.