Haiti: How Social Media Helped Break the News

Written by  – 15.01.10

By Guest Blogger Daniel Inniss

The power of social media was on full display this week as people took to social networking sites to blog, tweet, post and update their statuses.

There’s nothing particularly new in these activities, what is amazing is what they were posting about and the effect this had on the biggest disaster so far this year.

From eyewitness accounts, to calls for aid – social media effectively broke the news on Haiti’s worst quake in two centuries. Proving once again that news is becoming dependent on social media and its legions of users’ real time updates.

News of the earthquake spread within hours through Twitter, with photos of the earthquake appearing soon after.

Help Haiti and the Red Cross have been trending topics in the days following the quake, and tweets from high profile celebrities such as Wyclef Jean have helped spread the word of the plight of the western hemisphere’s poorest country.

Even the biggest news networks had to rely on social networks to get information on the earthquake in Haiti. Twitter was again seemingly the media of choice, mirroring last summer’s explosion of Tweets on Iran.

It is the personal nature of these networks that make their cries for help so much more effective.
But still, plenty of people use Twitter, Facebook and the like to update the world on what they had for breakfast or how bad their hangover is.

A current popular trend on twitter is about what you would do to your partner if they cheated on you and lets not forget the #lowbudgetmovie’s geeky humour. Showing that despite social medias now increasingly important role in news and serious discussion, it can at the same time be entertaining and fun.

I for one will be keeping an eye on Twitter Trends. After all; this is the future, real time news from real people.

Daniel Inniss

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This entry was posted by Daniel Twigg on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under News, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Haiti: How Social Media Helped Break the News”

KJA says:

Social media is a powerful tool for those that have followers. How many would care/feel for Haiti if it wasn’t for celebrities and/or other famous persons? How many would care/feel about other global disasters in the 20th century if it hadn’t been brought to attention by celebs?

15. 1. 2010 at 5:10 pm

Ian T says:

One of the main arguments against the proliferation of such social media is that we’ll then be relying on our news from untrained and possibly uneducated individuals. Your thoughts on this and how best to mediate it in the future?

15. 1. 2010 at 7:37 pm

Jab says:

I think the importance of twitter is overrated myself. Here’s to quality, professional news reporting.

15. 1. 2010 at 9:31 pm

Tweets that mention Haiti: How Social Media Helped Break the News « Silicon Beach Training Blog -- Topsy.com says:

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Wheeler, Frantz Cator, Ben Steeples, SiliconBeachTraining, Roshni Kanabar and others. Roshni Kanabar said: http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/haiti-social-media-news/ interesting article about haiti earthquake [...]

15. 1. 2010 at 10:04 pm

Paul Glover says:

The real breakthrough in these situations will come when the world has the ability to provide real on the ground aid from the comfort of their home with linked in ability to give. A real effective way that this is propegated in Africa is through money sent on cheap mobiles. This to a certain extent cercumnavigated the economy in Zimbabwe in a period of hyper inflation and gave the people there the ability to live. The response to this is great and social media is got to be the way forward with Rupert Murdock deciding that news should be paid for. Better the world should hear a thousand peoples opinions that one.

16. 1. 2010 at 5:53 am

Daniel Inniss says:

@Ian T,
That is a worry, but mainstream news outlets should make use of the social media and attempt to strike a balance between “untrained” social reporters and journalists. I beleive social media is news in its raw form, and if the news agencies want to make it the future they will have to distill it into something more. Striking the balance between these two types of reporting is going to be the key to success in the future.

19. 1. 2010 at 12:06 pm

The Future of Journalism or The Death of Journalism « Silicon Beach Training Blog says:

[...] online media such as Twitter and Facebook are the first to break news events, and we even wrote a recent blog post on this which received some interesting reader comments. Newspapers are already attempting to [...]

26. 2. 2010 at 3:25 pm

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7. 3. 2010 at 5:45 am

How Social Media is changing the job market « Silicon Beach Training Blog says:

[...] longer passive consumers of news and information. In contrast, as we noted in a recent blog post, social media is becoming crucial to breaking the news. Through our social networks we now receive the exact news we are interested in, from people who [...]

16. 4. 2010 at 4:32 pm

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