Journalists To Only Twitter & Facebook In Farmhouse

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Shevonne authors at ChicWriter.com and wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

This is a True Story of Five Journalists Picked to Twitter and Facebook

Everyone knows the popular words that always start a Real World episode,

“This is the true story… of five strangers… picked to live in a house…work together and have their lives taped… to find out what happens… when people stop being polite… and start getting real…The Real World.”

It seems like something out of MTV’s “Real World.” The Public Broadcasters Association has picked five Journalists, from Canada, Belgium, France, and Swiss radio stations to live in a French farmhouse. And their only contact with the outside world is via Twitter and Facebook. This is an experiment to see if Twitter and Facebook, and other social networking and micro-blogging sites are viable sources of news and current events.

Francoise Dost, the representative of the French-language public broadcasters association, stated, “We will give them five computers with blank hard drives” Dost added, “They have agreed to be linked to the outside world only through Twitter and Facebook. No web surfing is allowed.”

As we know, some of the main stories, like Michael Jackson’s death and the earthquake in Haiti, broke on Twitter and similar social networking sites before the news channels covered them. This experiment is supposed to test if social networking and micro-blogging sites are serious threat to news media.

In the past year, we have seen an increase of stories about how print newspapers and magazines are losing readership and money to people turning online to get their news. One popular magazine, PC Magazine, even decided to stop print and go 100% digital. Is this the future of newspapers and magazines?

In order for this to be tested in the right way, the five journalists need to do these five things:

1. Follow/Add the right people - One thing that the five journalists should be aware of is that they have to be following the right people in order to see the information they seek. Additionally, it has to be people who post different types of news instead of the same news over and over again. Therefore, follow/add the people on Twitter and Facebook who have different interests and views.

2. Follow the right lists – They should probably head to Listorious and check out Twitter lists that people have created. There are different lists for each main subject, and they should at least subscribe to the popular ones.

3. Subscribe to Media Facebook Pages – They should add Facebook pages from reputable sources that will keep them up-to-date on what is going on in the world.

4. Check the Twitter Trends – They should be aware of what is trending on Twitter.  If they only have access to Twitter, then they can just view the Twitter trends directly from their Twitter page.

5. Use Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck– Hopefully the five journalists are able to download one of these applications whereby they can access Twitter and Facebook all in one view.  It will be a headache trying to go back and forth on both sites.

It will be interesting to see the results of the experiment.  But for those who of us who use Twitter and Facebook heavily, I think we all know what this will lead to.