There was an interesting item on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about social media. Five journalists from French speaking radio stations are currently locked away in a secluded farmhouse in France with no access to news apart from Twitter and Facebook.
The aim behind the five-day experiment is to see just how good social media can be as a news source and to test how accurate a picture of the world’s events can be gained this way.
So many teenagers eschew normal news sources such as television, radio and newspapers, but are constantly plugged into happenings on Twitter and other social media. Is this the way they should be receiving news of main events?
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We’ll have to wait until the hacks emerge from their five-day ordeal (though the idea of a French farmhouse for five days with no news or Internet access sounds rather delightful to me) to get the full run-down.
The Canadian journalist interviewed on the Today programme declared himself a news junkie, so perhaps an interesting side-experiment would be to study how the news black-out affected the stress levels of the journalists involved.
