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Twitter has re-emphasised the importance of maintaining strong credible sources and the need for journalists to add real value to the news stories that they create, according to the latest Media the Media debate hosted by PR Newswire. But while checking Twitter and other social networking platforms has become part of a journalist's daily routine, they are not viewed as reliable sources but instead are considered to be a type of free-flowing newswire that should be used with caution.

'When other sources dry up, you turn on Twitter and go through that,' conceded Paul Murphy, editor in chief of FT Tilt, and founder of FT Alphaville. 'But Twitter is a newswire that everybody can see and contribute to. As journalists, we used to have semi-exclusive access to newswires and other kinds of regulatory sources of information. These are now completely public. Twitter has the effect of removing exclusivity from every single story.'

'In an ongoing story, Twitter creates a timeline of everything that is coming out on a minute-by-minute, second-by-second basis, which you can draw on,' agreed Steve Dinneen, senior reporter at City AM. 'But it certainly is not a source that any journalist should rely upon. However, one of the really good things about Twitter is that its information flow is not yet controlled by PRs. Some of the stuff is hearsay and speculation which may turn out to be true.'

However, the journalists agreed with Andrew Bowman, key account manager at PR Newswire, that it is not the platform on which the information is delivered that matters but rather the need to verify sources. 'If you look at stories that have less regulatory restriction around them, like entertainment and lifestyle, the speed of turnaround on social media is much quicker because less checking and sourcing tends to be done,' he said. 'In the financial arena, however, where there are more regulatory restrictions, it is going to take a lot longer. It is nothing to do with the channel itself; it's to do with the source.'

'Absolutely, it is always about the source of information. I come back to the theme of verifying news. It is an old-fashioned notion that something can be absolutely true,' said Murphy. 'Somebody in the corporate world will say We haven't put out a statement; we will tell you the truth through a statement. But we all know that company statements do not necessarily give you the full picture. They don't give you the truth.'

Sources are everywhere

Mark Leftly, deputy business editor at The Independent on Sunday, added: 'Everything is a source potentially. You can't rule anything out. But if I am breaking a story on an initial public offering (IPO) this week, I really won't care what the PR tells me. I will care about what the source says, high up in the company, or what the bankers actually involved in the deal tell me.'

But journalists agree that the rise of social networking is pushing traditional media towards a conversational style of journalism. Leading financial journalists, such as Mark Kleinman, business editor at Sky, and Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, write engaging and influential blogs that have created, as Dinneen put it, 'news stories with a brand'.

Murphy added: 'We have to understand that, in so many cases, our readers know much more than we do about any given subject. The financial blogosphere has been slow to take off in the UK, but in the US there are so many expert bloggers on any subject. One job of a journalist now is to curate the reader through these.'

Leftly said: 'But there is a lack of journalistic skill in a lot of what is happening out there, in terms of things like verifying stories. People actually believe what they read on social media platforms and actually tend to doubt the newspapers and broadcasters, when actually we have been professional about checking our stories.'

'But we need to consider when a story is fully formed and when you can publish it,' added Murphy. 'The actual demand for news has changed, in a sense. A corporate financier, for example, is not interested in a fully verified box form story in a newspaper. It's history. But they'll pay huge subscription fees for a service, like MergerMarket, which is a raw kind of global aggregation with, dare I say it, semi-verified news attached. To a certain extent, rumours are stories now.'

Connecting with journalists

The rise of social media has also created a new channel through which PR professionals can connect with journalists, but there are still some rules to be observed. 'I had a PR once befriend me on Facebook, and then tried to pitch stories through it, which I didn't take kindly to at all,' added Dinneen. 'Facebook is very much a personal thing whereas Twitter is predominantly a professional platform, where you kind of expect and encourage such activity. If I have a particularly interesting story, I will tweet it. If I have an exclusive, I'll tweet it. When I was covering the News Corporation story, I thought I'm on top of this, so I'm going to tweet the hell out of it. I was tweeting every ten minutes. I gained quite a lot of followers, but lost even more. My Twitter policy is obviously not right.'

Giles Fraser, managing director of Brands2Life, agreed that social media has created new challenges for PR professionals. 'We find a lot of journalists are asking us to pitch stories through Twitter. But there are a few who say You can't articulate it properly in 140 characters, so it's not a good idea. But it gets rid of the surplus flim flam that we sometimes put into press releases, and really boils a story down. We tend to say Here's a theme, here's an idea but there are lots of opportunities to do that and we've seen quite good results.'

'I hate asking questions over email,' said Dinneen. 'It's so easy to avoid the question or to put a personal spin on it. You can't beat phoning someone up or, even better, meeting them face-to-face. Social media has not replaced that.'

Leftly agreed, saying: 'If you ping an email out, you give the person at the other end the chance to consider the response. It just elongates everything. You have to write it. You send it. You consider it...it's so much easier to have a chat on the phone.'

But Murphy pointed out that, sending a press office a long list of questions on email, allows journalists to use the so-called Reynolds Defence in the case of libel. 'It basically says that I, as a journalist, have taken professional steps to check these facts so that, if I get some of them wrong, then I have a degree of protection under libel laws.'

Click here to view the Meet the Media Multimedia News Release, with images and video of the event.

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