One of the greatest challenges journalists face today is learning how to manage a news conversation. According to Mark Briggs, this begs three questions:

• How do journalists participate in the conversation without sacrificing their objectivity or credibility?
• What about legal and ethical issues now that everyone can publish anything they want on a professional news site?
• And what happens when you really want the audience to participate, but they don’t?

News conversations have changed drastically over the past few decades. What once was a lecture is now an interactive conversation. Journalists require feedback and encourage discussion among readers and viewers.

What are some ways that online journalism has allowed for user participation?

• Comments: That little box on the bottom of every story that allows you to type your thoughts on the story allows journalists to receive feedback.
• Discussion forums: These discussion forums range from topics such as politics to fashion to sports. They allow the media to keep up with how the conversation is going among the public.
• Social networking: Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have been critical in listening to conversation among the public. Believe it or not, when you write a status update about Joe Smith, Joe Smith is out reading it.

Sometimes it can be difficult to monitor such conversation when people become outraged and nasty. All communication is not good communication. But remember to take everything with a grain of salt and try to learn from everything, even the negatives.

Happy reading folks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Briggs Chapter Summaries.  Tagged managing conversation, mark briggs, online journalism, Social Media, Twitter You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.