The survey was conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar, and involved interviews with more than 10,000 people from Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai). Although the Arab television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were the top source of news in most of the countries that took part in the study, on average Facebook was the third most popular.

If you look more closely at the numbers, the average for Facebook is hugely influenced by Tunisia, where more than 50 percent of all respondents said the social network was their number one source of news — in Bahrain, only 11 percent said the same, while Facebook’s ranking in the UAE was 10 percent and in Qatar it was 3 percent. The only countries to mention Twitter were Bahrain, where 8 percent gave it as a top source, and Saudi Arabia where it had 3 percent.

Social media is much more influential

Northwestern journalism professor Justin Martin, one of the researchers who did the study, told the media news site Journalism.co.uk that “if you look at the percentages of internet users who are active on social media sites, it’s much higher than the United States and Australia or Western European countries.” Martin said that this fits with earlier research that shows Arab countries are much more social in their use of media than many Western nations:

“Arabs, maybe more than any other culture around the world, have these anchored communities where they receive and share news and information and they tend to go there often for news and they tend to trust the information from their anchored communities.”

As a number of media theorists have described, social media’s effect on our news consumption is in some ways a throwback to the way news used to be consumed and distributed before newspapers existed — when coffee shops and other social outlets were the main source of information for communities (it’s also not clear from the study how much of what is shared on Facebook is news from a traditional source such as a newspaper or television network).

What is clear from the study is that people in some Arab nations don’t trust the traditional media much at all, which could also be driving them towards social networks as a source of news: in Egypt and Tunisia — both of which experienced revolutionary uprisings as part of the Arab Spring — only a quarter of those surveyed said they thought the media was a credible source.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social-media use influenced the revolutions in Tunisia and other Arab countries, and how social networks helped to overcome some of the barriers that kept popular dissident movements in those countries from turning into revolutions in the past.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel / NBC

The first piece was a column by NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan on the weekend, about the recent explosive NSA revelations, which were reported primarily by the Guardian — a relative newcomer to the U.S. news scene. Sullivan was responding to a number of reader comments asking why the Times had missed this particular bombshell, and wondering whether the newspaper had been approached but had chosen not to publish the story.

News will find its own outlet

As Sullivan explains in her piece, the NYT apparently wasn’t contacted by Snowden. But it’s understandable that some readers would wonder whether the paper had decided not to go with the story, since something similar happened in 2005 with another story about government surveillance: at the urging of the Bush administration, the Times sat on the story for more than a year — something Edward Snowden said influenced his desire not to go to the newspaper with his NSA leak. As Sullivan notes:

“The delay hasn’t been forgotten. The video journalist Laura Poitras, who worked on the N.S.A. stories in both The Post and The Guardian, said the earlier delay by The Times influenced Mr. Snowden’s decision on where to take his information. What’s more, when a video or article released anywhere can go viral in minutes, the outlet is less important.”

Meanwhile, in a separate piece published Sunday, NYT media writer David Carr talks about another story that got away: in this case, the story about Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his alleged crack-smoking behavior, which appeared first on Gawker — and then subsequently in some of Toronto’s major newspapers, which had apparently been working on the story for some time.

Like Sullivan, Carr notes that certain news stories don’t wait for traditional journalistic organizations to get around to reporting them — that “big news forges its own path,” as he puts it. And he also notes that this is just a more recent version of something that has been occurring for some time:

“Traditional news organizations used to be free to break news — or not — in their backyard and on their chosen beats. Now they have to be looking over their shoulder — at everyone. And in virtually every aspect of culture, from business to technology to fashion, the big guys now compete with a range of Web sites that break their share of news through obsessiveness and hyperfocus.”

The path of least resistance

The “hyperfocus” that Carr mentions is an important point. As I argued in a recent post, the Guardian likely got the Snowden leaks in part because of the obsessiveness and focus of Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer-turned-blogger who has devoted much of his writing to cataloguing the government’s malfeasance related to WikiLeaks and whistle-blower Bradley Manning — a point that journalism professor Jay Rosen made in a recent post as well.

In the not-so-distant past, the New York Times was one of the main platforms for breaking this kind of news, and perhaps even the main platform. But given its behavior in cases like the pre-Iraq war reporting of Judith Miller and in the case of the 2005 surveillance story, it’s not surprising that leakers like Snowden might decide to take their story elsewhere — and there are plenty of other outlets for that information, including places like WikiLeaks.

Carr is right that “big news forges its own path.” In a sense, it is like water, which takes the path of least resistance. The New York Times and other outlets used to be the water company, but they are no longer the only outlet — and if they provide too much resistance, the news will flow elsewhere. Whether that is ultimately good or bad for journalism remains to be seen, but it is a fact.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / SoulAD and Flickr user Jan-Arief Purwanto

But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.

The Oriella Digital Journalism Study asked 553 journalists in 15 countries about their outlook and their publications, and reflects some interesting geographic differences. Here are some highlights:

• 59 percent of journalists are tweeting in 2013, versus 47 percent in 2012.
  

• Twitter use is highest in English-speaking countries, while barely a third of German journalists have a Twitter account.

Here’s a graph that shows the relative popularity of digital and social media tools:

And here is how social media use varies across countries. Note the difference between France and Germany, which is surprising given the reactionary attitudes towards digital journalism often found among news organizations in both countries.

Here are a few other interesting nuggets:

• Citizen journalism is making inroads: A fifth of those surveyed said it carries as much credibility in their organization as mainstream reporting.

• Thirty-nine percent of journalists regards themselves as “digital first” (perhaps the flip side is more striking — 61 percent still regard themselves as print journalists).

In a related release, Robin Grainger, Director of the Oriella PR Network, said the findings suggest that “‘Shorter but quicker’ journalism may afford media brands greater prominence – and consequently greater traffic — in search rankings, news readers and social news aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Pulse News.”

The countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.. On average, 37 journalists were surveyed in each country. You can find the report and more here.

(Image by Aaron Amat via Shutterstock)

Although it’s tempting to compare these events to the uprisings that took place during the so-called “Arab Spring,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci — who also happens to be Turkish — has pointed out in a perceptive essay that what is happening in Istanbul is very different. For one thing, Turkey has a democratically elected government, and there has not been the same history of brutal repression as in Egypt and elsewhere. So this is not about the overthrow of a dictator.

Local media initially ignored the story

That said, however, there is enough popular dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Erdogan that what began as a small and peaceful protest over the building of a shopping mall has turned into a series of mass demonstrations against the authorities — events that appear to be fuelled by a number of issues, including the government’s aggressive redevelopment policies and some festering historical animosity towards the ethnic Kurdish population.

And what have the local media — or even the local branches of international media — been doing since this all began weeks ago? Mostly ignoring the demonstrations and paying attention to other things, including a special broadcast report about penguins that CNN Turkey chose to air in the middle of one of the largest demonstrations, to the chagrin of many Turks. Other channels broadcast cooking shows and historical documentaries.

Remember CNN Turkey aired penguin documentaries during worst clashes? Desperate Turks try to lure it back to news. twitter.com/sinancanyurt/s…

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 4, 2013

Among the reasons given for the lack of coverage are the fact that some of Turkey’s major news entities are sympathetic to the Islamic government of Prime Minister Erdogan, and also that these large media conglomerates have corporate parents who are beholden to the government because of their interests in other businesses like mining and energy. In frustration, some of those involved in the protests started a crowdfunding effort in order to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times, and raised more than their goal of $53,000 in less than 24 hours.

Social media filled the news vacuum

In response to this information vacuum, social media has become even more important as a source of news about what is happening and where. Hashtags on Twitter and Facebook groups and other tools — including private mobile-messaging services, since the Turkish government has reportedly been blocking some public internet services — have become a crucial way of getting information for many Turkish residents. Just as they did in Tahrir Square in Egypt, these tools have allowed those who are experiencing the news to report on it themselves.

So while social media and tools like Twitter were criticized for doing damage to people’s understanding of what was happening during the Boston bombings or Hurricane Sandy, because of the false information being circulated, those same tools have become a lifeline for many in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey because their local media is not doing its job properly.

In fact, Twitter became such a crucial tool for some of those in Turkey that the prime minister railed against the service, calling it “the worst menace to society.” And in a somewhat darker move — one that sounds a little more like Egypt or China than a democratic nation like Turkey — as many as two dozen protesters were detained by the Turkish authorities on Tuesday because they were accused of using Twitter to foment unrest, and charges could be laid.

Letting citizens know they aren’t alone

In her essay on the effect of social media on the way that information flows during such events (something she also wrote about while the Arab Spring was taking place ), Tufekci notes one crucial aspect of what Twitter and Facebook and other services do during such events: in a nutshell, they allow others to discover that they are not alone. The breaking down of this “pluralistic ignorance,” as Tufekci describes it — helped jump-start demonstrations in Egypt when decades of repression and poverty had been unable to do so.

“The key conceptual issue here is not digital versus non-digital but visibility, accessibility and signaling power. Street demonstrations, in that regard, are a form of social media in that they are powerful to the degree that they allow citizens to signal a plurality to their fellow citizens, and to help break pluralist ignorance. Overall, social media are altering mechanisms of collective action in societies and we have just begun to understand this fundamental shift.”

In the end, social media and networked systems of all kinds accomplished in Turkey what the traditional media is supposed to but didn’t: namely, informing Turks about what was happening in their country, and at the same time letting those involved know that their voices were being heard by the government. And that is the real power of networked media.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

Bruni’s column, entitled “Who Needs Reporters?,” describes a series of recent events in which public figures did an end run around the mainstream media: in one case, former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann announced via a video message that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term in Congress, and in the second case former Congressman Anthony Weiner announced that he was going to make a bid to become mayor of New York City. A third incident involved Senator Hilary Clinton, who announced her views on gay marriage.

Has the fourth estate become less relevant?

The NYT columnist argues that this kind of end-run around the traditional media potentially does far more harm to the fourth estate than the much more controversial attacks on whistleblowers and journalists who have received government leaks:

“Our role and relevance are arguably even more imperiled by politicians’ ability, in this newly wired world of ours, to go around us and present themselves in packages that we can’t simultaneously unwrap. To get a message out, they don’t have to beseech a network’s indulgence. They don’t have to rely on a newspaper’s attention.”

Bruni goes on to say the videos made by Clinton and Bachmann are “harbingers of an era in which YouTube is the public square, and the fourth estate is a borderline obsolescent one.” And he admits some may see the decline of the journalistic sector as a good thing, given the level of mistrust many have in the media — which he blames on “our cynicism, superficiality… and tendency to see all politics in terms of the contest rather than the content.”

In the end, the Times columnist argues that journalists are needed more than ever because the ability to reach an audience directly makes it easier for politicians to “construct a Potemkin identity, a facade at odds with anything behind it,” and therefore journalistic skills are required to get behind that facade and reveal the truth — or to “poke and meddle,” as he puts it.

Move up the journalism value chain

In a way, I would argue that the phenomenon of “sources going direct” (as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it in the past) has the potential to make journalists — or at least journalism of a certain kind — both less necessary and more necessary at the same time.

What it makes less necessary is the kind of stenographic journalism that consists of simply showing up to a news conference and writing down what a politician says, or rewriting a press release that has been handed out. As Brian Stelter noted during a social-media weekend last year, if your job is just to get Rupert Murdoch to say things, having the News Corp. chairman saying things on Twitter to some extent makes your job a lot harder.

Looked at another way, however, this allows journalists of all kinds — both professional and amateur or “citizen” journalists — to move up the value chain, as disruption expert Clay Christensen has described in his recent paper on the evolution of media. If we see the media as providing a service (or “jobs to be done,” as Christensen calls it) then part of that service used to be telling people what politicians said, or what the government wanted them to hear.

Now that this can be accomplished largely (or increasingly) without journalists, it should free up a whole class of reporters to do more value-added journalism that explains what things mean, or questions the statements of politicians. All they have to do, as Om has explained, is choose what to amplify and what not to amplify. And won’t we all be better off if that happens?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / wellphoto

Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are all hugely popular social companies that aren’t making much money right now (with the exception of Tumblr, and that might be debatable.) They’ve raised huge amounts of venture capital or have been acquired by companies for such large price tags that they’ll have to make money soon. But the core value proposition for these three services, one that’s certainly reflected in the attitudes of the founders, is that that they are beautiful, creative online spaces. So how do you put ads there without ruining the atmosphere you’ve created and that users have come to expect?

Mad Men advertising executives explore the brand new world of video ads in the 1960′s.

Obviously, many forms of advertising have been around for hundreds of years, but only in the past 15 or so have we seen a change in how search and contexual ads have had an impact on the business. This search-driven model existed before Google, but from the time the company launched AdWords in 2000, the concept of text-driven and contextualized ads based on search really began to take off. This data-driven approach has affected much of online advertising since then, and Google has developed a billion dollar business around the practice.

And along with search, display ads have also been a signficant part of the puzzle. In the early years of online advertising, it seemed that banner ads and other forms of display would be able to mimic more old-school advertising methods, since they weren’t all that different from the then-profitable ads in print. But the format is no longer dominant — in fiscal year 2012, search ads brought in 46 percent of revenue from advertising, compared to the 21 percent of revenue coming from display ads, according to an IAB report.

Why advertising should get to know us

Most recently, the rise of social media and smartphones that track everything in our daily lives from location to spending habits to real-world friends have made keyword search or banner ads start to feel fairly impersonal. Now Facebook can serve you ads for cars if they think you’re likely to buy a car soon, or Twitter can show you promoted tweets based on the messages you post. These companies haven’t totally cracked personalized ad-targeting yet, but they’re working on it. As those companies know, advertising needs to feel useful and relevant if it’s going to work — all without seeming creepy or invading of a person’s privacy, and useful to a person on both desktop and mobile.

That’s a tough balance to hit, and it certainly doesn’t seem that those companies have totally succeeded yet. If the Mad Men era Madison Avenue experts figured out how to tap into a person’s core desires to re-create advertising in the 1950s and 1960s, we’re still waiting for someone to do the same with in the current digital era, by adding a layer of emotion and desire to the social media and consumer data that’s out there.

The idea of the moment, which we’ve written about extensively here at paidContent, is native advertising: creating “sponsored content” from brands that fits in with the look and feel of the site but is labeled as an ad and supports that particular brand. Tons of sites, from Buzzfeed to The Atlantic to the New York Times (to GigaOM itself) do sponsored stories. It’s how Tumblr’s ads are rolling out for companies like Denny’s. And in particular, for sites like Instagram, it seems like potentially the only way to preserve the aesthetics of the site while letting brands in the door.

Young founders look to their history books

When the Yahoo/Tumblr deal closed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talked about her intentions for ads on Tumblr and how CEO David Karp (who had previously decried advertising of any kind) imagined them on his site:

“David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change … we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

And speaking at the Commonwealth Club on Thursday in San Francisco, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom was equally nostalgic about old-school advertising and how it might work for his own company:

“We made a promise that Instagram would be a self-sustaining business, and that promise still holds true today. The deal makes no sense if you think this thing will never make money. We’ve always had plans, and it’s just about when, and it’s just about how,” he said. “Think about the magazine Vogue, for instance, and how half that magazine is advertising, but that advertising is really compelling.”

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk with Google Ventures’s Kevin Rose at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on May 30, 2013.

Finding the Don Draper approach to social

Systrom and Karp might be inspired by old Vogue ads, but it doesn’t seem that Tumblr users are as enamored by Denny’s gifs, and it’s fair to say that I’d be far less offended by a slightly off-target ad on a news website than one posted in my Instagram feed. The founders have accomplished a remarkable feat of creating companies where users feel personally and emotionally attached to the experiences they have there — just ask someone like Om who’s made a digital friend with someone he’s only “met” through Instagram.

But by raising the bar for what we expect on their services, the founders might have made navigating advertising that much harder for themselves. We’re in a whole new world of digital media, just as Don Draper and his executives faced with the rise of the television. But just as those executives saw the change as a new opportunity to reach consumers in their living rooms, so too could Pinterest and Instagram see this as an opportunity: to make digital advertising personal.

There’s no question that the layoffs were a hugely painful event, not just for the Chicago media but for many fans of photo-journalism. John White, one of those who was laid off — after a 44-year career at the Sun-Times that included a Pulitzer Prize win — said it was like the newspaper “pushed a button and deleted a whole culture of photo-journalism.” (Some speculated that the Sun-Times might have an ulterior motive: in 2008 Newsday fired all 20 staff photographers and later rehired some as multimedia editors).

A dedicated photo desk is a luxury

The cuts were widely criticized as a knee-jerk reaction to financial pressures by newspaper managers who don’t understand or don’t care about journalism: A photo-journalist at the competing Chicago Tribune (which has suffered through some challenges of its own related to outsourcing aspects of its journalism) called the paper’s move “idiocy,” and said the idea that freelancers and reporters with iPhones could replace a staff of professional photographers “idiotic at worst, and hopelessly uninformed at best.”

The New York Times said that before the layoffs the paper had a staff of professionals with the hard-earned ability to tell stories with pictures and now it has “some freelancers and reporters toting cheap cameras with their notebooks and pens.” The writer went on to paraphrase the viewpoint of the Sun-Times presumably: “Who cares about news judgment, composition, story-telling, impact, beauty or whether an image is even in focus? Photos are just something bright and colorful to wrap the text and ads around.”

This is clearly hyperbole, of course. As emotional a moment as it might be when so many jobs are lost — and so much obvious talent — a common theme in much of the coverage of the Sun-Times layoffs is what seems like a deep mistrust of the whole idea of using freelance photographers, or the idea that iPhones used by reporters might suffice in some (not all) cases. But this is misguided: the reality is that almost every newspaper, magazine and wire service uses freelance photo-journalists, many take award-winning photos.

It’s also obviously the case that iPhone or handheld photos are often just as good — or even better, from a real-time, breaking news point of view — than a professional picture. And to denigrate “user-generated content” simply because it comes from potentially (although not always) untrained photographers is to miss the exact same point that the rest of the media industry has been missing about the value of “citizen journalism” or whatever we choose to call it.

Outsourcing and crowdsourcing works

That’s not to say the Sun-Times handled this particular transition well, because it clearly didn’t. Jeff Jarvis says the paper was both right and wrong — right in the sense that there are more photographers and potentially newsworthy photos available everywhere, since everyone has a powerful camera in their pocket, but wrong in the way they handled the change. Instead of letting them all go, he says they should have redefined the job so that photographers would become curators of crowdsourced photos as well as creators.

It would be nice to think the Sun-Times — or any other newspaper — could convince its existing photographers to do that. And maybe some will be able to. But many professional photo-journalists would find that transition difficult if not impossible, just as many professional journalists of all kinds find it hard to admit that at least some aspects of what we call journalism can now be practiced by anyone with a functioning brain-stem, a sense of curiosity and the luck to be close to a breaking news event.

The Sun-Times, like every other newspaper, is having to confront two painful realities: one is that journalism of all kinds is no longer the exclusive purview of a newspaper and its staff — anyone can, and will, practice it, and readers will seek it out elsewhere for a host of reasons, both good and bad. And the second reality is that the cost structure of many mid-size metropolitan newspapers simply doesn’t work any more, and outsourcing is one way of handling that problem — not just for the photo desk, but potentially for copy editing and other functions as well. That is the future, whether we like it or not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Shutterstock / Lightpoet

The somewhat inflammatory headline aside, I think Fishman makes some good points in his post about the role of social-media editor — although, like Mallary Tenore at the Poynter Institute, I would argue that the job is not really dying at all, but instead is evolving. So in a sense, those who say the job is outdated and those who argue that it is still necessary are both right.

What do social-media editors do?

The latest version of the argument seems to have been triggered by Anthony De Rosa’s departure as social-media editor at Thomson Reuters earlier this week (he is joining the San Francisco-based mobile news startup Circa as editor-in-chief). That sparked a discussion — which included Reuters blogger Felix Salmon and Business Insider writer Joe Weisenthal — about how few prominent social-media editors there were left other than Andy Carvin of National Public Radio (who doesn’t actually use that title).

One of the arguments that Fishman makes — in addition to echoing criticisms from Choire Sicha at The Awl that many social-media editors don’t seem to actually accomplish very much — is that “social media” has become so central to what most media outlets do now that having a specific person dedicated to doing it seems like an anachronism, and in that sense I think he is right. The idea that one person should be the “social-media editor,” and thereby handle all of the social aspects of the news or content business is definitely outdated — or at least should be.

As a historical footnote, I’m pretty sure I was the first “social-media editor” at a major North American newspaper, although at the Globe and Mail (a national daily based in Toronto) we called it “communities editor.” I started in 2008 by setting up the paper’s Twitter account and trying to help reporters and editors understand how to use it, along with Facebook and other social tools, and was mostly a one-man band. Now, many media outlets have entire teams.

Fishman notes that Liz Heron, who was then a social-media editor at the New York Times, predicted in 2011 that her job would eventually disappear — but as Poynter notes, Heron is a perfect example of how the job is evolving: at the same time the debate over the death of social-media editors was getting started, Heron (now at the Wall Street Journal) announced she is becoming the “editor of emerging media,” which involves both social and mobile.

Social media skills are even more necessary

In his own contribution to the debate, De Rosa argues that while some media outlets have absorbed the lessons of being social to the point where most of their staff are comfortable with what’s involved, that is far from being the norm in the industry. I think his point is that the skills of a good social-media editor are still required, and in some cases may be even more important than before because the pace of change continues to increase.

“Newsrooms need to be better at doing these things without the help of a social media editor. Sorry, but most of them are not there yet and killing off the role of the Social Media Editor won’t help it happen anytime sooner, in fact it will likely make the transition longer and more painful.”

So is the notion of a single person who spends their entire day on Twitter creating hashtags and calling themselves the social-media editor dead? Yes — or at least I hope so. The idea that being social or engaging with readers in new ways belongs to a specific subset of journalists reminds me of the bad old days when newspapers had a single “internet editor” or “web editor.”

Just as those skills became part of almost everyone’s job, being social (with all that vague term implies) is also part of everyone’s job, or soon will be. All media are becoming social whether they want to or not, but some need more help doing it than others — as the author William Gibson once said, the future is already here but it’s still not very unevenly distributed.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

The facts are these: The Guardian (please see disclosure below) has opened a small shop called #GuardianCoffee in the fashionable neighborhood of Shoreditch in London, near the newspaper’s headquarters. It offers coffee from a local roaster, as well as iPads that are free to use — and Guardian social-media editor Joanna Geary apparently plans to spend at least some of her time in the shop, interacting with readers as well as doing live interviews.

The launch generated some fairly predictable reactions: the idea that this would give new meaning to the “daily grind” of a journalist’s life, some pointed comments about how the salary of the baristas at the Guardian coffee shop (reportedly up to $52,000) would make the job look pretty good to many struggling reporters, and some comments about how customers would have to make their orders conform to the Guardian‘s left-leaning focus (i.e., no calling your coffee “black”).

I'd rather spend £2 on a latte, thanks all the same. #guardiancoffee—
Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 30, 2013

The idea of having an “open newsroom” that allows journalists to mingle with readers and have coffee or other condiments around isn’t new: the Torrington Register Citizen in Connecticut, part of Digital First Media, opened up its newsroom to the community in 2010 and offered coffee and internet access — readers are also invited to attend story meetings, and can get help with tips on reporting or video editing if they want to practice any “citizen journalism.”

Coffee, sandwiches and journalism

The Winnipeg Free Press in Manitoba, Canada also launched a coffee shop venture called the News Cafe in 2011, where some of the paper’s journalists spend part of their time in the shop interacting with readers, and the newspaper does live interviews and contests (Note: An editor emailed me to say journalists don’t regularly work in the cafe, but the live events are very popular). The cafe even gets good ratings for its coffee and sandwiches on the Urbanspoon app, although one commenter says the latte is “rubbish.”

In a sense, the Guardian’s coffee shop is just another element of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s approach to opening up the journalistic process, which has also involved allowing readers into the story selection process and launching a mobile app that encourages users to post tips and contribute to stories in other ways. Rusbridger talked about the idea of open journalism during an interview at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York, which is embedded below.

Update: A reader noted that an ambitious project by an investment firm in the Czech Republic aimed at opening a chain of hyperlocal newspapers and coffee shops failed and was shut down in 2010.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover and Jim Waterson