The Rise of Social Media

00:00:07
Kevin Smith-Fagan
If you wanna remain relevant, you're gonna have to talk to the audience where the audience is, and increasingly, that's on the web and that is at Facebook or Twitter. I mean, the social media is now really — we still call it social media, but it's kind of just media.

00:00:27
James Rainey
Here I am, I've been a newspaper reporter for close to three decades. I've got a number of colleagues who've been at it uh.. as long uh.. I'm constantly now uh.. I can't — I just can't believe I'm saying this. I'm constantly on Twitter. I've got it up on my screen and I l — I check in on Twitter several times a day.

00:00:46
Richard Campbell
This is oral communication, which has been around since the days of alphabets. There are things that bubble up that take the old and reconfigure it. Uh.. for instance, if you looked at email, some people might argue that email was a new form of media, but really, it's uh.. it's a conversation. It's a very old form of communication, but it's just transmitted digitally, and uh.. but- but it's people sort of talking to one another in little messages. I think Twitter is the same kind of thing,

00:01:18
and what we have now is just different ways to transmit this. Uh.. so things like new media, whether it's — whether it's uh.. s- so called social media, like Facebook uh.. these are reconfigurations of old ways to communicate with one another.

00:01:38
James Rainey
And uh.. as uh.. bogus and as much of a giant uh.. time vacuum as Twitter and other social media can be, at the same time, if you use them correctly and you have a sense of balance uh.. you could actually get quite a bit out of them. It — to me it's- it's all a sense of proportion and who are you following? Who — y- you still uh.. one thing that I think is- is successful about Twitter is, you pick uh.. the audience that you want to group with and- and

00:02:04
uh.. I've follow, you know, roughly 70, 80 different folks and most of them are in either media or politics and uh.. I get a lotta tips on things that're going on. I get links to stories a- actually, which is good for old media. I'm often getting a link from Twitter to go back and read something in the Wall Street Journal New  or the New York Times or even t — ironically, I think a couple times I've li — I've been linked back to a story in my own uh.. paper that I hadn't seen, that I'm reading on LATimes dot com, and

00:02:37
I missed it in the morning paper, but I find it on Twitter. So uh.. it's a — it's a new world when that's happening.