Lisa talks with her hands about why she uses social media on the job. (Photo credit: Miss604 on flickr)

This weekend at the Northern Voice conference, Kirk LaPointe from The Vancouver Sun and I spoke on a panel called “How (Should) Journalists Use Social Media.”

The visuals I used, created using a new-to-me online tool called Prezi, are posted online here.

I won’t recount the whole thing, but here’s a couple of key ideas I talked about.

Social media makes my city smaller

My city, but smaller and more interesting. (Photo credit: ecstaticist on flickr)

Smaller, more interesting, perhaps even more friendly.

In my talk, I told a story about my first job at CBC: a short-term stint as CBC Radio’s Nelson bureau reporter. There, it was a lot easier for the public to reach me, if they wanted to. No security desk, no switchboard in Toronto, just a one-room office and the phone number was in the book.

In a big city newsroom like CBC Vancouver, it’s very different. It would be easy (though not smart) to avoid “the audience” almost completely. In my opinion, good journalists don’t — with or without social media. I use tools like Twitter to reach out beyond the people I would otherwise know, to get to know my city better. My networks are bigger, and that makes my city smaller.

Social media as “social scanner”

So, if you see something on Twitter, do you go report it on air? No, of course not.

It’s like a police scanner to me. People who work in news sometimes listen to chatter on the police scanner to find out what’s happening. A fire in Coquitlam. A fatal MVA in Abbotsford. Just because you hear it, doesn’t mean you immediately go on air with it. You need to find out more. But now you know what to find out about.

That’s how I use Twitter, and other social media tools. If I see a tweet about something that could be breaking news (like the injuries at the Alexisonfire concert in Vancouver during the Olympics) then I start asking questions, and searching for more.

Stream vs. reservoir

Other reporters, or people starting to use Twitter on the job sometimes ask me how I keep up with my followers. And the answer is, I don’t.

For me, email : reservoir :: twitter : stream.

The water in the reservoir of a dam is contained and accounted for — stored until it’s eventually released through the turbines, or out some overflow. That’s email to me: I have an obligation to deal with what’s sent to me.

For me, Twitter and blogs and Facebook are streams I dip in and out of. I enjoy them while I’m there, but I don’t feel beholden to track every drop of water that flowed before and after my visit. Nor do I expect that of others.

How do you think journalists should use social media?

Thanks to notes from DameEmma, Stephen Hui, ivantohelpyou, shamelesshussy, Miss604, Gillian Shaw, Rob McMahon, di_marshall and Hummingbird604 for helping me decide what to repeat here.

I’m going to be speaking at the Northern Voice conference this weekend, joining Kirk LaPointe from the Vancouver Sun on a panel called “How (Should) Journalists Use Social Media”.

One of the tricky things in trying to prepare my presentation is that the subject matter is my job, but this is supposed a “Personal Blogging and Social Media Conference” — something the conference organizers reminded speakers about, oh, five or six times.

So, what to do?

Well, quite a few people are talking about their jobs, actually. Take uber-science communicator David Ng for example. Science is his work, but it looks like his Northern Voice talk will be a human take on the world he works in, and a project he’s passionate about.

And that’s what I’ll be aiming for. Using social media as a journalist is guided for me by personal interest and my own judgement of where lines are that shouldn’t be crossed, not just by CBC corporate policy. [See below for more discussion of this point]

If you’re at Northern Voice, maybe you’ll check it out. Or, just say hi in the atrium.

Update: We discussed this a bit in my talk, and I’d like to add in text here what I said there. I am mindful of CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices, and know I could be called on by my bosses to defend anything I write online. But the official rules haven’t kept up with the changing technology and ways of working, so I have to use my own judgement to decide how to apply them to new situations. And, I use social media because I want to, not because I’m told to.

Lisa on Grouse Mountain

One thing I’ll do here is post about the stories I’m reporting. They range from newsy, like the crash in recycling commodity prices, to the more citizen/consumer focused. For example, I recently did a piece on the messy question, “How clean does my peanut butter jar have to be to get recycled?” (Pretty clean, it turns out.)

I used to be a biologist, or at least a biologist-in-training. That makes me a geek for all kinds of things that many journalists I’ve met dislike, including animal carcasses and math. The problem of communicating science and risk well in the news is an ongoing interest of mine.

I’ve also been working at another intersection lately — where mainstream media is experimenting with social media. I was part of the team that started the Your Story project in 2007, which was CBC’s first pilot in citizen journalism. In some ways, this is a natural next step, another tool for newsgathering. But there’s also a culture clash there — which makes it tricky, and interesting.

After a period of meaning to, I’ve now stumbled through enough code to put together this site, as a place to write about these topics.

Thanks for checking it out!