Facebook, Twitter and TikTok: journalists can’t survive without them …

Social networks, Fannie Bussières-McNicoll uses them to the fullest. In a pandemic, needing incarceration, it was through his Facebook account that he launched calls to everyone. Hello, I am a journalist for Radio-Canada and I am preparing a dossier on … I am looking for testimonials. Please contact me privately.

To get the pulse of public opinion, the journalist must leave the circle of friends-family-included, and social networks make it possible to reach people who would otherwise be hard to reachsaid Fannie Bussières-McNicoll.

On Facebook, the reporter invites himself to private groups dedicated to a theme or defending a goal.

But some of these groups, wary of mainstream media, are reluctant to accept journalists into their ranks. This is the case of people who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19. However, Fannie Bussières-McNicoll wanted to talk to them, because she had heard that, in the school yard, children were playing hunting for the unvaccinated. The journalist tries to reach parents who are worried that their child will experience stress because he or she has not been vaccinated.

The administrators of the groups, to which he immediately confessed that he was a journalist, initially refused to admit him. Many unvaccinated children complain that the media ignores them, he explains, so I realize to them that by participating in my article, parents of unvaccinated children can, certainly, testify to their truth. It freed things up.

A wealth of topics

Lack of housing, compulsory vaccination of travelers or screening for COVID-19 at the border: there is no shortage of topics monitored by journalists in discussion forums. Once a situation arises, bang, bang, bang, messages multiplysaid Fannie Bussières-McNicoll, who even received messages from Facebook group administrators warning her that business was happening.

And then there are the comments. Fannie Bussières-McNicoll read it all. After publishing her text about pregnancy during COVID-19, a woman wishing to adopt a child wrote: Me, I’m expecting my little baby, he’s in Haiti, and everything’s on ice. This is how the journalist found out that the entire international adoption network was on hold during the pandemic. He contacted this woman and produced a new text that sparked comments from women forced by the pandemic to shorten their trips to fertility clinics.

Another text, other comments, this time was from couples who preferred to postpone their plan to start a family. Eventually, he produced a series of eight reports in two months!

The work needs to be done

But on social networks, not everything is true. One thing to take an idea out of it, another thing to make a text or report. The work needs to be done, warns Fannie Bussières-McNicoll. Make sure the topic is of public interest, that the source is real and the information is true, say by finding the right word, put in context … The essentials of journalism.

François Messier, who is passionate about covering politics, has always turned the Tweetdeck technology platform on one of his three screens in the radio-canada.ca newsroom in Montreal. (Tweetdeck fixes this ocean of Twitter content.)

When President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in Haiti, I subscribed in time to tell it to about fifty accounts of journalists, elected officials, Haitian senators, he describes. Is he reading about someone who is interested The world where the Washington Post? He finds it on Twitter.

In addition to subscribing to several thousand Twitter accounts, François Messier has turned his back on Dataminr. This tool, which is not a strictly speaking social network, opens up hope: if information spills over into a sector he or she has previously identified, this web editor will be alerted.

At the end of January 2022, Émilie Dubreuil traveled to Ottawa with a cameraman and a photographer. Its mandate: to cover for TV, radio and web the beginning of the demonstration of people who, among other reasons, opposed the forced vaccination of truckers against COVID-19.

Before leaving, he did what all journalists do : Follow the Twitter and Facebook accounts of important people and organizations, such as the Ottawa Police Service.

As for his own Facebook account, it is mostly only used to distribute texts of which he is the author, like a kind of newsletter. His Facebook friends are over 3,000 and, no, he doesn’t know them personally.

” If I don’t put text on my Facebook page, very few people talk to me about it, look at it, read it. On the other hand, if I put it on social networks: poof! “

On these platforms, journalists, like those who shouted the town back then, produce news and promote their work, as described by Fannie Bussières-McNicoll, so that it does not die there after the first publication or broadcast.

Being a journalist at Radio-Canada is not enough to enjoy a certain visibility? No, cut Thomas Gerbet, journalist at Radio-Canada. There are people waiting on their social network, just getting information on this network. This social network needs to bring them information.

” We are building […] a kind of community. I receive a lot of messages from people who will suggest topics to me. So our presence on social networks leads people to write to us. “

For documentation, Facebook and Twitter are useful: they take us to a different world than websitessaid Thomas Gerbet.

On Twitter, he makes lists and targets people in specific areas of interest: it allows me to clean up a little and not do too much. noise. It also uses notification systems to identify interesting publications. Thomas Gerbet occasionally uses Instagram to geotag photos.

But, many pairs of eyes are already on social networks, journalists in search of originality should maybe look elsewheresuggests Thomas Gerbet.

He, to find scoops and primeurs, are said to often rely on good old telephones.

Social networks continue the work that the Internet has previously begun to shrink the planet, explains Vincent Grou, that work as a journalist on social networks did not exist when he started the profession, at the beginning of the century! Part of the job is to broadcast Radio-Canada Information content on various platforms. The public broadcaster’s Facebook page alone has 1,378,078 subscribers.

” Social networks have facilitated public interaction. I can’t count how many times people write to us, on Facebook, and their stories come out as news. “

Politicians and other public figures know how closely they are monitored by journalists (and not just them) on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. The skill of digging into their accounts to see their past statements and photos with controversial people is facilitated by social mediaadded Vincent Grou.

Finally, no one beats Twitter for following the telling of a story in sequence, sometimes in real time, he says. Its size continuous thread lends to it.

The risk of spread

Launched in 2016 and known for being popular with teenagers, TikTok boasts of having one billion users.

For the RAD team-Radio-Canada’s journalism laboratory-we clearly need to be there.

In February, as RAD aired its first clips on TikTok, Russia attacked Ukraine.

RAD and its journalist Nicolas Pham asked TikTok the question everyone is asking: are we witnessing the start of World War III? The response of analyst François Brousseau, encapsulated in less than a minute (New window)was viewed 163,000 times.

So far, RAD has 10,000 TikTok followers. This is another place to identifyexplained Johanne Lapierre, editor-in-chief of RAD

Short content produced by RAD in vertical video format is also published on Instagram and YouTube Shorts: We’re on the run-in, we see what workssaid the editor-in-chief.

On the other hand, RAD has never invested in Twitter, because his public is gone, says Johanne Lapierre. When we go to a platform, we take care of it, we don’t want to litter.

In a social network, content is generated by users. Their attention is being grabbed by the news media. Youtubers can sit for a few hours? They are served by documentaries. TikTok followers put audio on what they’re listening to, but those on Instagram usually don’t turn it on, just watch. Hence the importance of subtitles in content placed on Instagramexplained Johanne Lapierre.

It’s not enough to have information and fit in there, there and there, he warns. We need to wonder about the best way to do this, according to the codes of different platforms.