Journalism Is Dead! Long Live Journalism!
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Sydney PR agencies are well-versed in using Twitter as an info-gathering and news-breaking tool – but Facebook Live is the next logical step.
Sometime way back in the digital infancy of 2010, Facebook released Facebook Live, a platform (at the time) solely developed to update users about to to-ings and fro-ings of the world’s favourite social media platform. Featuring celebrity interviews and company updates, Facebook Live always seemed built to eventually turn the power over to its users in a live-streaming free-for-all.
Flash forward and the power of Facebook Live is now well and truly ours, yours, theirs, and everyone else’s. Although I don’t feel personally equipped to show off me eating a burrito AS IT HAPPENS, this vehicle for instant, interactive recognition signals a major change in the consumption of media and, in particular, news journalism.
Recently the New York Times celebrated a mammoth achievement by managing to last an entire month as a publisher on Facebook Live without it totally blowing up in their faces and hundreds of journalists losing their jobs.
As per Digiday, the NYT developed 90 pieces of “live interactive journalism”: a wedding ceremony for their Weddings section; Nicholas Kristof interviewing Caitlyn Jenner; and even a walking tour of Havana. These varied stories and 87 more were pumped out to its 11 million followers, each receiving a notification that ‘The New York Times is now… LIVE’.
Spin over to the other side of the world and you’ll find me watching a live stream of some dude I know’s cat giving birth – and that was great, too! Not just visually disgusting in a satisfying way, but also interactive and as ‘RIGHT NOW!’ as you can get. I knew that cat had given birth at roughly the same time it knew. That video had 20 intrinsically involved viewers at any given time, so imagine the scale that live news broadcasts free from the perils of scheduling could have on the media landscape.
People laud Twitter for its ability to break news as it happens – Sydney PR agencies are well-versed in using it as an info-gathering tool – but this is the next logical step. It’s visual – video hosts can react in real-time to comments on the feed – and content consumers are notified as soon as the broadcast begins. If 800,000 people watched a Buzzfeed Live video of rubber bands being placed on a watermelon until breaking point, imagine the impact of a wacky Sydney PR stunt, let alone the last play of a Super Bowl, a terrorist attack, the birth of a prince (eww…), or man landing on Mars…
Evan Hill Porteus
(Display image: Social Media Knowledge)
