The fourth annual Social Journalism Study, conducted by Cision Germany and Canterbury Christ
Church University, is charting the changes of how journalists and media professionals use social
media for their work and in their communication with PR professionals.
It shows that social is part of the journalists toolkit in their everyday work for a range of different tasks. However the results show a concentration of time and focus on social media so rather than using a large range of tools for a large amount of time journalists are choosing to focus on specific tools, namely Facebook and Twitter whilst experimenting on a much smaller scale with more bespoke tools for particular activities. Whilst many believe they could not carry out their work without social media, Finnish journalists feel it has helped their productivity but this hasn’t in turn decreased their workload so essentially it helps them produce more content. The relationship with PR professionals is satisfactory but there are areas to improve around the quality of their contribution to journalists work and the reliability of information. Email remains the main communication channels for PR professionals but there is evidence from a small number of
journalists that they would like to see social media used more widely for sharing PR content with
journalists
