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Members and communicators gathered to hear award-winning network news television producer Melissa Cornick at this month’s IABC-LI meeting, where she expressed her view on how social media is causing an end to traditional print journalism as the fourth estate and cultivating a future for citizen journalism as the fifth.

Cornick addressed how the presence of social media has changed essentially everything in the communications industry. It has created a completely new channel for information to be shared and grants regular people more control than ever over their relationships with the media and the brands they choose to embrace. Cornick’s take-away message was that social media has brought with it a new era of journalism placing the job of reporting news in the public’s hands, and it remains our responsibility, as business communicators, to address this growing medium as a legitimate information platform.

While marketers are using social media as a way to better capture the attention of individual demographic segments, through tools such as Consumer Intelligence, Cornick’s attention is elsewhere. She works to develop new pathways for people to participate in digital platforms, giving them the chance to report individual, untold stories the media tend to avoid, such as micro-local issues within a community.

Surpassing print journalists as the only ones with the power to report news, and embracing a future where all people have a place in the virtual world of citizen journalism, Cornick explained, is where social media is taking us.

 

Cornick’s website can be accessed at: http://www.oneifbylandbuckscounty.com.