20 Apr Social media: Necessity or time-waster?

From left: Anthony Cusumano of News 12 Long Island, Carl Corry, Anne Machalinksi of Newsday.com and Dominick Miserandino of TheCelebrityCafe.com.

On April 16, I moderated a panel on the benefits and pitfalls of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in journalism. Basically, panelists from some major local outlets say they’re a good way to pick up trends, but that’s about it.

Here’s the Press Club of Long Island blog item on the event, which was attended by about 60 people.

It’s okay to let sites like Twitter and FaceBook  point to trends in breaking news, but it still takes good, old-fashioned journalistic fact-checking with trusted sources  to write it right.

That was the message from panelists of the April 16 PCLI  discussion, “Twitter, Facebook and why media matters.”

Panelists included Anne Machalinksi, online editor of Newsday.com and ExploreLI.com; Henry Powderly, Web editor of Long Island Business News; Anthony Cusumano, the planning editor at News 12 Long Island, and Dominick Miserandino, executive editor of TheCelebrityCafe.com. The panel was moderated by Carl Corry, executive producer of News 12 Interactive.

Most panelists said they’d prefer not to spend much time on social media sites in order to focus on their over all job responsibilities.

For it’s part, Newsday, which currently feeds in headlines to Twitter and Facebook, will likely have to reconsider how it participates in social media sites and focus on local readers as it prepares to begin charging for its online content, Machalinksi said.