Comm455/History of Journalism

This Tuesday our guest speaker is Jack Censer.

Mr. Censer used to teach The History of Journalism and is a fan of the Old Regime French Press and the French Revolution (all according to Professor Klein so if this is not true I refuse to be held accountable). Anyway, one of my themes is the velocity of news and this week I thought I would include social media and throw in a little France (just a couple of hundred years later) while I’m at it. So this blogpost will somehow attempt to tie these three themes together.

There is no shortage of social media networks–Facebook, Twitter, the new Google + and LinkedIn are all extremely popular social media networks that have their own specific purpose. While they can all be classified under the social media network umbrella, they aren’t really interchangeable.

Here is a list of the top 15 social networks according eBusiness site ebizmba.com as of October 2011 by the numbers: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites

I’ve discussed the power Twitter and how fast it can break news in this post but what about Facebook? What I learned doing a little research is that Facebook doesn’t necessarily have people break news but it certainly driving traffic to news sites.

Here is a cool infographic on the numbers and different news sites that Facebook leads to (you can click on the image to make it larger).

image via http://www.reportr.net/2011/05/09/social-media-influences-spread-news/

“Facebook’s audience is vastly larger than any single news organization. Its role has evolved from a network for friends to share personal information to a way for people to share, recommend and link together all kinds of information, including news. If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next, ” according to this article.

Now onto France!

Did you know that in France over 77% of the Internet population is a part of at least one social networking site? One thing that France has to rival Zuckerberg and Facebook is a social networking site called Copains d’avant. This site allows former and current French university students to stay connected. It currently has Facebook beat numbers wise (about 6% more users) although Facebook is rapidly gaining ground. France is also is 13th Twitter country with 1% of Twitter users coming from France. In fact, Paris is in the top 10 most populated Twitter cities in the world.

So there you have it folks. This was my attempt at tying social media, the velocity of news and France all together. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re not part of a social network, you don’t really exist. This is maybe an exaggeration but you get the point.