To begin with, social media comes in many flavors, from wikipedia to flickr, from digg to Facebook. I suggest Danny Sullivan’s excellent breakdown post: http://searchengineland.com/how-search-like-social-media-16325

If we wish to abide definitions, social media IS media, a means to store and/or communicate data. Data need not be news or facts. Case closed.

Journalism is another can of worms. It is the objective gathering and dissemination of news, for the most part (that defined by college degree programs). (In the broader sense, however, journalism is simply the recording of one’s thoughts in a more or less chronological order.)

Social media may or may not be news journalism, as it may be junk, rumor, opinion or a twitpic (although, arguably, a twitpic is closer to journalism than many a tweet– heck, that would make flickr the most journalistic of the social media sites).

A big difference between social media and journalism goes to the web 2.0 point. Traditional news media and journalist reporting is a monologue (I don’t count letters to the editor as meaningful dialogue). Social media, whether or not performing journalistic tasks, allows for a dialogue.

In the end, neither journalists nor social media broadcasters have a monopoly on truth, and isn’t that the end game for most of us? At least SM broadcasts take editors (paid by MSM publishing empires) from the game— for some, this may be a bad thing– for others, it takes the censor out of the game.

In the end, more to filter through to find more gold in the stream.

To begin with, social media comes in many flavors, from wikipedia to flickr, from digg to Facebook. I suggest Danny Sullivan’s excellent breakdown post: http://searchengineland.com/how-search-like-social-media-16325

If we wish to abide definitions, social media IS media, a means to store and/or communicate data. Data need not be news or facts. Case closed.

Journalism is another can of worms. It is the objective gathering and dissemination of news, for the most part (that defined by college degree programs). (In the broader sense, however, journalism is simply the recording of one’s thoughts in a more or less chronological order.)

Social media may or may not be news journalism, as it may be junk, rumor, opinion or a twitpic (although, arguably, a twitpic is closer to journalism than many a tweet– heck, that would make flickr the most journalistic of the social media sites).

A big difference between social media and journalism goes to the web 2.0 point. Traditional news media and journalist reporting is a monologue (I don’t count letters to the editor as meaningful dialogue). Social media, whether or not performing journalistic tasks, allows for a dialogue.

In the end, neither journalists nor social media broadcasters have a monopoly on truth, and isn’t that the end game for most of us? At least SM broadcasts take editors (paid by MSM publishing empires) from the game— for some, this may be a bad thing– for others, it takes the censor out of the game.

In the end, more to filter through to find more gold in the stream.