Assessing the impact of social media on newsroom organisational structures by Clare Cook, University of Central Lancashire.
With social media’s increasingly important role in fast-paced news, there is a need to identify the occupational and professional implications of social media specifically in terms of jobs and roles in newsrooms. This paper serves as a preliminary enquiry into what social media jobs have been created in newsrooms under which job titles. It explores trends associated with this and the tasks being carried out in those roles to assess the extent to which social media is ring-fenced as a responsibility. From this it is possible to query the wider impact of social media on organisational structure in newsrooms. Two main newsroom models are identified: firstly, newsrooms that place an emphasis on everyone being responsible for social media and secondly, newsrooms where social media is a specified role. The study further serves to guide social media skills for inclusion in journalism training.
