The evening started with the results of a survey by Frank De Grave (Quadrant Communications) on the current state of Social Media used by journalists. Interesting stuff, although some members of the panel argued that the recent evolutions in the Middle East dramatically changed the adoption of tools like Twitter in the average newsroom.

There are two interesting posts that talk about this debate on http://pnintelligentdialogue.be/ and that kinda summarize some of the key elements of the evening. 

The first one is titled “Journalists: to tweet or not to tweet?” by Kirsten Malfroid. The other is “Twitter, a threat to a journalist’s personal brand?” by Christian Remon.

What is your opinion about the link between social media and journalism?

According to an analysis from Trendrr, which tracks terms on Twitter, the word “earthquake” reached 19,360 tweets per hour when the earthquake first struck, and peaked at 35,430 Twitter posts an hour as people started waking up in the U.S. By late March 11, a total of 246,075 Twitter posts using the term “earthquake” had been posted to the microblogging service.

More and more we see that consumers pick up breaking news by watching their Twitter timeline.

Citizen journalism

We’ve been talking about citizen journalism for years, but this year it is really happening. First we had all the news from the Middle East. It was pretty easy to control the traditional media in a certain country, but it is really impossible to control the power of the people. I love this evolution.

Question is how news websites will and real journalists adapt to this new approach? It would be great if they take citizen journalism more serious. Marketers had to learn to deal with consumer feedback and they are evolving towards co-creation. Can and will journalists do the same? Will they co-create the news?

I recently saw a great example from the Washington post where they integrate the full blog of a consumer into their newspaper. Another example:  Al Jazeera English quickly pushed a live stream of Japan’s devastation on its website, one of the first major news organizations to do so.

These examples are first showcases on how journalism is changing its approach. I’m looking forward to see further evolutions in this. Have you seen any great examples where journalists adapt their approach to citizen journalism?