Social Media is Just Part of the Story

From Tunisia to Egypt to Libya, uprisings in the Arab World are popping up and surprising both journalists and government officials. Protesters are making use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to send out messages, meet up and garner support. Social media is now becoming a metric that news outlets use to tell the story about uprisings and potential protests across these countries. While some news organizations like Al Jazeera use numbers of tweets to measure what's going on, The New York Times introduced an interesting platform that uses Twitter updates as one tool to help tell the whole story. Rather than simply plotting how many people on Twitter tag Syria or Libya, The Times offers online readers a country by country look at the "Arab World Uprisings". For Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, the site displays the most recent news stories, twitter updates, and information about who is in power and when they took power. While the site does not fully integrate detailed background information, or attempt to draw too many connections about what's going on and why, it does recognize that there is more to the story than who is tweeting and how many times a day. I applaud The New York Times for acknowledging the importance of social media in telling these stories while also not distilling the uprisings to just a story of social media. The immediacy of social media allows for up-to-date information, but the links to previous articles allow the viewer to learn and experience more than the brief summaries that tweets provide. It will be interesting to see how news media continue to try to make use of social media to help tell stories that are more complex than 140 characters allows.