Intro

Module 5
Social Media

The explosive growth of social media is changing the way individual journalists and news organizations cover the news and publish their work. The expanding list of social networks available also is changing the way news consumers access and share information. As you complete these exercises and explore the module resources, you will learn to:

  • Produce content differently. Whether it's speaking directly to your audience, understanding what types of images work best, or creating a video that works with no sound, you need to treat social media as a set of unique distribution platforms.
  • Promote discoverability. Social content is fragmented across dozens of networks, so journalists must work harder to incorporate key words, tags, and other strategies to get their content in front of an audience.
  • Value metrics. Data are a tool that helps drive decision-making in today’s newsrooms, but with the metric tracking capabilities of most social media platforms, you have to learn how to prioritize the metrics to promote quality journalism.

Module Exercises

  • Exercise 1: Skill Building--Write for Social
  • Exercise 2: Reporting With Twitter
  • Exercise 3: Using LinkedIn for Journalism