Journalists and The Social Media

“Just stop trying to be objective. I think this is the point of blogging: That you get online and you share with the world how you feel.”

Not quite the words you would expect to hear from a prestigious, award-winning journalist to a young, aspiring journalist. But that was the advice I received from Mona Eltahawy, activist in residence at The University of Oklahoma.

With all the talk of the emergence of citizen journalism, coupled with advancing technology and information available at someone’s fingertips on one’s mobile phone, social media and blogging have more functions than their original intentions.

“You need to start thinking about Facebook as something more than meeting high school friends, planning parties and putting pictures up because as useful as Facebook is for all of that, and Facebook can be fun, in many parts of the world Facebook has become an essential tool… because it connects internationally,” says Eltahawy.

These social medias have already been utilized in the mainstream media today. Professional journalists from Katie Couric to your local news anchor have integrated these social media sites to further their reach in the journalistic world. Is our society already seeing a revolution in the way we view and utilize Twitter?

In my personal experience (and I am justifying this by the opening quote), I am very new to the social media scene. I do not have a Facebook and just recently I activated a Twitter account. Twitter I find to be very useful, in the way of it being a “one-stop shop” to read up and get a basic gist of what is happening in the world around me.

For future journalists and aspiring ones, the challenge is to harness these social tools and utilize them to better serve our audiences in the passage of information, communication and criticism.

Asked if upcoming journalists should be required to have the social media tools of Twitter, Facebook and blogs, Eltahawy's response: “Absolutely.”