Megan Knight, Multi-media Journalist, works as a Good Morning Maryland reporter with ABC 2 News in Baltimore, Md. She interned at ABC 2 News during her junior year at Syracuse University. In addition to being a Multi-media Journalist, she has worked as an overnight producer and as a co-anchor of the weekday morning show at WKTV in Utica, NY.
Q: How important is it for journalists to be connected to social media especially twitter?
A: It’s almost a requirement these days for journalists to be on social media! With more organizations using things like Twitter to disseminate information, it’s imperative for reporters to be connected and stay on top of the latest information.
Q: What is your process for selecting a good tweet for your news story? Do you collaborate with a social media director at the station for the selection?
A: When I tweet my stories I front on Good Morning Maryland, I try to find the most interesting aspect of the story to talk about. When we have big, tease-able stories in our newscasts, our web department and producers will send out suggested tweets for us to use. We also link our followers to our stories on our website to get more web traffic.
Q: How does audience-interaction influence the stories you post on social media?
A: We have to find a balance of posting stories that are important for people to know and stories we know will be “talkers.” Our web department encourages us to constantly engage with our viewers through social media to keep a dialogue going. The more we engage, the better our viewers connect to us both on social media and through our newscasts.
Q:What impact do you think pictures and videos add to the popularity of a news story?
A: This is huge. Our web department pushes us to incorporate video with all of our stories, even if it is just 30 seconds of a scene from an accident or breaking news. A good example of this is the story of the teen being shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO. The pictures and video people posted from the protests on Twitter were powerful, and we used them often in our newscasts.
Q: Twitter has been known to send spam messages. Do you trust twitter as a secure tool for sharing the news?
A: With any kind of information you get, you always have to be careful about where it is coming from and Twitter is no different. While we are relying more and more on social media for information, we have to make sure it’s coming from a reliable source. Our assignment desk editors will often make calls or send emails to confirm information sent out on Twitter, just to be sure it’s accurate.
Q: How often do you post, share, or retweet news for work? Do you use a dashboard like Hootsuite.com to manage your multiple social media pages?
A: Part of our job is promoting the station any way we can, which means posting our stories, retweeting fun or important stories and sharing each other’s work on Facebook. Many of my co-workers use things like Hootsuite to manage their social media pages. I just use the apps individually (old school, I know)
Q: How does the use of Twitter affect the way news is shared in today’s society? Would you credit Twitter as a beneficial or detrimental tool for all journalists as it relates to competition and sources?
A: Twitter is a great tool and it can also get you in trouble! Like news reports and websites, there’s now a race to get the information out first on social media. You want to make sure what you’re tweeting is factual, and there have been numerous examples of news organizations being first but wrong. Accuracy must come first! It hurts your credibility if you’re constantly sending out the wrong information, even if you were the first to do so.
Josephine Hill 