Competing-Complementarity of Social Media and News Media: A mediamorphosis Perspective

Traditional news media is adopting social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) to complement the delivery and sourcing of news (Hong 2012) enabling news media to reach larger audiences with specific requirements of a target readership (Rosensteil and Mitchell 2012). As an example of how news media complements its services through social media, Cable News Network’s (CNN) Breaking News delivers news ‘tweets’ to its 4+ million Twitter subscribers while The New York Times targets news feeds to its 2.9+ million Twitter followers (Dugan 2011). On news sourcing, the New York Times and Associated Press are employing “social media editors” to source information from social networks (Glynn et al. 2012). For example, the Associated Press’ “Social Network Centre” directs editor’s to source newsworthy content from social networks, use the social networks to promote the company and its contents, and apprise news manager’s on interesting topics disseminating in social networks (Sreenivasan 2010). Such recent developments evidence the strategic value that news media places on social media networks (Sreenivasan 2010). This novel way of news sourcing and distribution complements news media operations yet differs from its traditional role of creating its own content with highly credible journalists and distributing through its own mediums (Glynn et al. 2012). This “complementarity” of social media on news media is clearly evident in the way natural disasters like the 2011 tsunami in Japan, civil unrests in the Middle East and war are reported, as well as the news sourcing of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.