#bbcsms: What the audience expects from journalists

'Audience Expectations': Report from the third session on day two of #bbcsms:

Esra Dogramaci from Al Jazeera said the broadcaster had a responsibility to educate people about how to use social media. Al Jazeera had distributed Flip cameras to "a community of citizen journalists" and was changing cultures in countries which were used to "a lot of state-sponsored and stage-managed journalism".

Dogramaci was at the Social Media Summit's session on audiences. Her organisation's policy of involving the audience in the information-collection process was questioned by members of the Summit audience: did it amount to abandoning neutrality in the politics of people versus authority?

Dogramaci said it was about "giving a voice to the voiceless", adding: "If you're asking what side Al Jazeera is on, yes, it's on the side of the people."

Neil Henderson of BBC News was concerned about the safety of those encouraged to use social media by Al Jazeera. "There's a risk," Dogramaci admitted, but she said it arranged for people to provide information anonymously.

Al Jazeera's offices in Afghanistan and Iraq had been targeted, and journalists were often under threat: "If your reporters are not being arrested... then you're not doing your job."

The session included audience perspectives from three other journalists:

Will Perrin, a community web organiser, described a number of British websites which were impressively busy despite minimal costs and staff infrastructure.

So, in King's Cross in London, a website run by four or five people attracts 500 people a day from a population of 12,000, for discussions about "crime, dog shit and potholes". Perrin said that was proportionately the equivalent of Newsnight's audience, achieved for just £8 in web-hosting fees a month.

Local sites don't have to pretend to offer objective journalism, said Perrin. They can be more optimistic than mainstream media, and don't need to be "wildly exciting": a photograph of a local flowering tree works just fine.

Christian Payne, aka Documentally, gave an account of his journey from disgruntled press photographer, fed up with newspapers "messing with" his pictures, to freelance media experimenter and traveller in search of stories.

He found that putting his video on YouTube got him a bigger audience than any newspaper could. But he admitted it was "not easy to earn a living... you have to be passionate about what you're doing".

The final speaker was Sina Motalebi of BBC Persian TV. His positive attitude to incorporating social media was the opposite of what he'd heard from a senior journalist a few years ago, who'd told him that people don't come to the BBC to hear what other people are saying, but what the BBC is saying.

He'd seen the influence of social media in output grow so that, instead of being an undercurrent which didn't affect politicians directly, today it had real effects. Social media which the BBC had verified would find itself back on YouTube but with the BBC's brand on it, meaning added credibility: "Our most important currency is our reputation." 

Original blog post introducing third session on day two of #bbcsms:

It's not just journalists that are getting to grips with social media: their audiences are too.

Where in the past most journalists' customers had to wait for the newspaper to arrive or the broadcast to air, today audiences are learning about breaking stories at the same time, and maybe even from the same sources, as journalists at mainstream media organisations.

How is these audiences' changing use of technology changing what they want and expect? That's one of the issues up for debate in the third session of the BBC's Social Media Summit: 'Audience Expectations'.

Judging how to change in response to audience participation in social media presents complex choices for mainstream media. Assuming too much about how the audience has changed risks alienating part of it with endless references to tweets and Facebook pages. While failing to acknowledge change may leave part of the audience feeling they can follow stories just as well on their own.

And when audiences can go online and pick their own news agenda, how should news organisations, which have traditionally set their own news priorities, adapt to the new world? How much customised output should they offer?

And how much should news organisations encourage social media use among their audiences - possibly to their own detriment and the commercial gain of tech companies?

Please contribute your thoughts, ideas and experiences in Comments below, and we'll feed them into the debate on Friday. What practical changes should we be focussing on?

The panel includes Joanna Geary (the Times), Will Perrin (hyperlocal blogger) and Sina Motalebi (BBC Persian). Details of the Summit and confirmed guests here; list of attendees here.