by Rob Welham
BEIJING, Jan. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Five journalists are locked up in a room for five days with access only to Facebook and Twitter, two popular social-networking platforms.
The aim is to examine the quality of news sourced from the two websites and to find if the new methods of communication pose a serious threat to traditional media.
Twitter has played an important role in disseminating news. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks in India in November 2008, Twitter provided first hand accounts of events on the ground. Some also rebroadcast events as they unfolded on television, keeping others without access to a TV constantly informed. Some of the first pictures to emerge from incidents come from citizen journalists armed with their mobile phones.
In January 2009, passengers on board the plane which made an emergency landing in the Hudson Bay in New York were the first to post pictures to the Internet of the stricken jet.
A month later in Amsterdam when a Turkish airliner crashed, early pictures were sent out by Twitter users, and networks were alerted to the incident not by the authorities but by passengers and passers-by.
The recent events in Haiti, following a massive earthquake that may have left 100,000 dead, has also highlighted how modern technology has changed the face of news reporting.
The journalists taking part in the experiment will be given computers that can only access Facebook and Twitter. All other sites will be blocked and there will be no ability to read newspapers, watch TV or listen to the radio.
Each day, the reporters from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will each go on the air on their respective channels to comment on the news that they have found.
“This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter,” said Helene Jouan, a senior editor at France Inter, one of the stations that is sending a journalist. “Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,” she said. As well as the radio broadcasts, the public may also follow events on Twitter at @HuisClosNet/lesjournalistes, though most of the tweets will be written in French.
(Agencies)
