How social media can help rescue journalism | Dan Mason's media and learning blog

I live in London, not Damascus. But, I have to tell you, the last few weeks have been a journey.

Over the past three years, I’ve been managing editor for a dozen fine newspapers and websites in London. And I’ve seen more change in the last few months than at any time during my 27 years as a journalist and media manager.

Newsrooms can be surprisingly risk-averse places. Nevertheless, my journalists went further, faster towards a multimedia future than many thought possible. I’m proud of them.

Many good journalists across our industry are afraid. Or they’ve lost their job already, due to the actions of people like me. But you can’t run forward while you’re looking backwards and, be under no illusion, we’re facing a watershed in journalism. I’m optimistic and I’m excited. Despite my own redundancy a month ago.

Actually, my optimism is sparked by the potential benefits for our communities and certainly not by a blinkered view of the very real crisis facing local media in and outside the UK. As I’ve said for many years: In my book, journalism is not just about the acquired skills of writing, design or photography. For the most part, that’s the easy bit. It’s not rocket science. I believe we earn the right to call ourselves journalists only when we can demonstrate the power to make a positive difference to the communities we serve. Full stop.

My point is, we have more tools (if fewer people) to achieve this aim than ever before. If our current business structures can’t sustain our place as the mortar between the building blocks of local life, then the choice is simple – change fast or fail. That’s called business. Or, as is already happening, others will take up the tools and do it themselves. That’s called social media.

I’ll be developing these themes with opinions and examples in future blogs. But back to the dusty road travelled …

I developed an interest in inbound marketing before I knew what it was called. To illustrate. while an enterprising sports editor tripled the audience on one of our newspaper websites by working out how to employ the insatiable appetite of sports fans to amplify the exposure of a story, blogs were hardly making a dent in traffic. SEO is part of the answer … making the social network connections work both ways is the key.

It’s this ability to harness, facilitate and promote responsibly the connections that, in my view, will lie at the heart of journalism in future. Right now, journalists need communities a lot more than communities need journalists. It pains me to say it.

I’ve just done a rough count of the number of social media-related websites and blogs I’ve read, signed up to or bookmarked (hello Del-icio-us and Furl) over the last two weeks, Around 250.

OK, I confess that while deciding which of the 39 Share This options to include on my blog, a career as a Middle Eastern goatherd did start to look mildly attractive. But then I wouldn’t have discovered Wordpress, which is, simply, a revelation. Thanks, Julien, for the theme design.

As always, temptation lurks. I was checking my LinkedIn groups a couple of hours ago, had a peep at Mediashift and from there happened across a great blog by Chuck Peters, which echoes many of my own feelings going back over a decade. Back to the present via the clever and quirky Blendtec ads (linked to from Mashable’s ‘10 of the smartest big brands in social media’ feature and ‘Top 10 for online marketing success in 2009’, by Aaron Kahlow.

And don’t mention StumblUpon – fiendishly compulsive. I was playing with Wordle for half an hour the last time I logged in.

Will all this translate into making a real difference to real people? Well, community and communication start with the same eight letters. And at a time when no-one has all the answers – and perhaps it’s precisely because no-one has the answers – there’s no shortage of people willing to share their knowledge and passion. To name just a couple, Mike Volpe, who’s series of inbound marketing presentations on Slideshare makes excellent reading, and Chris Brogan, whose blog is an inspiration,

Well, I’m off for a Juice. But, in these troubled times, if you need a sign that journalists really are ready to run with change, just do a search for some of the innovative ways Twitter is being used to break news and enrich content through sharing. And that’s what it’s all about.