Full disclosure time: I’m an old newshound. An ink-stained wretch, to be exact. I spent 20 years in print journalism. Before the economics of news-gathering made it such a tough business, it was a thrilling, highly competitive environment where your rival was your enemy.
But today, April 27, 2009, at 4 p.m. Central time, I saw something that turned that on its ear. The local ABC affiliate, KSAT 12, retweeted a news item from its NBC affiliate rival, News 4 WOAI. It involved the report of damage from a tornado that touched down in DeWitt County. Even more impressive than the retweet was the use of good Twitter etiquette as KSAT credited WOAI.
During my 20 years, I had thousands of my stories read verbatim on the air by talent that did nothing more than read the paper. So the giving of credit stunned me. My officemate, who spent 18 years in TV, commented that no station would EVER credit another station on air.
The folks at KSAT are Twitter masters so they know all the ins and outs of how to Tweet and giving credit where credit is due. What’s amazing is that we have a news organization promoting information gathered by a rival. Maybe this happened before. Maybe it happened today because it involves a tornado. Maybe this was prevalent during Hurricane Ike.
Still, it is another barrier that is crumbling under social media’s weight. This kind of sharing would have been unheard of just a few years ago. But we are dealing with new models and a new environment where the dissemination of the information is more important than credit for its distribution.
Is it a one-time thing? Am I overreacting? Let me know.
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Certainly not a one-time thing.
Not only are news stations retweeting each other and – hopefully more often than not but definitely so in the case of KSAT – crediting each other as sources… they are entering agreements to share photography, video and more content so as to make the most of what staff they have left by pooling together each of their resources.
For now… I think the competition is not between stations but between the state of the media, which now very much includes social media.
Now, onto that new business model!