ในโลกโซเชียล มีเดีย...ทุกเศษเสี้ยวของนาทีคือเส้นตาย

นักข่าวรุ่นเก๋าอย่างแดน ราเธอร์แห่ง CBS แม้จะมีความเห็นเชิงวิพากษ์ต่อ social media ในการทำข่าวทุกวันนี้ แต่เขาก็ยอมรับว่าใครไม่ใช้เครือข่ายสังคมอย่างทวิตเตอร์หรือเฟสบุ๊คก็จะล้าสมัยไม่ทันการ เพราะเขาเองก็ยังต้องมีหน้าเฟสบุ๊คสำหรับรายการทีวีของเขาเพื่อสนองความต้องการของคนดูและคนอ่านในยุคปัจจุบัน

ราเธอร์บอกว่าโลกโซเชียลมีเดียทำให้คนทำข่าวมีสมาธิสั้น ไม่มีเวลาวิเคราะห์และคิดอะไรลึกซึ้งได้เท่าที่ควร

"ทุกวินาทีคือเส้นตายที่ต้องส่งข่าว" เขาบ่น แต่ก็ยอมรับว่าในชีวิตการทำข่าวของเขานั้นอินเตอร์เน็ทคือเครื่องมือสำคัญที่ไม่อาจปฏิเสธได้เลย

แดน ราเธอร์เพิ่งออกหนังสือเล่มล่าสุดเล่มนี้ว่าด้วย "ชีวิตในข่าวของฉัน" ซึ่งเล่าขานถึงเบื้องหลังการทำข่าวหลาย ๆ ด้านที่น่าสนใจยิ่ง

ข้างล่างนี้คือส่วนหนึ่งของบทถาม-ตอบที่เว็บไซท์ Lost Remote สัมภาษณ์นักข่าวรุ่นลายครามคนนี้โดยเฉพาะประเด็นข้อดีข้อเสียของการทำข่าวกับโซเชียล มีเดีย

Lost Remote: How do you think social media, Facebook, Twitter, however you want to define social media, has affected news today?
Dan Rather: I engage in social media, a Facebook page, a Twitter page and I’m not an expert on it. Now you have a deadline every nanosecond. And you don’t have time you used to have to reflect and to think things through.   Never mind make telephone calls. It has shrunk as a result of social media.  You can see this most clearly in what happens at even the best newspapers. Not so long ago a writer for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would have until three, three thirty in the afternoon, to make telephone calls, perhaps to think things through, to try to connect the dots. Today they are under great pressure to fly along what’s called multi-platforms. The home office wants something to Facebook, wants something to blog, wants him to be on Twitter, and beat the competition. It’s very common today for a reporter to get a phone call or a text from the home office saying, “our competition has X and you need to beat it in the next thirty seconds, preferably less.”
I think the other thing that has made a difference with the social media is that, I want to state this directly, but I want to do it carefully, that in so many minds, what’s on social media is what’s called news. Sometimes it’s news and other times it isn’t news because there’s a lot of blurring that if somebody sitting in their living room has a thought, fancy themselves a thought with Twitter or even a couple lines, a paragraph on Facebook it maybe just what’s in their head at that moment, but if it happens to strike a certain cord, it can go viral or something close to viral and so often is considered a fact or close to fact when it isn’t.
There is no misunderstanding that we are in the internet era. We went from the print era, to the radio era, to the television era. We are now in the internet era. I think overall in the whole development of the internet, including social media, has been for the good. Not just in terms of news, but in terms of information, which is sometimes different education.
LR: Do you personally use social media at all for research, for promoting your news program on HDNet?
Rather: We do use it, and I do use it. The collective we being here at Dan Rather Reports, our weekly news program and I use it. I don’t think you can be effective these days and not use it. I do think that you can get over focused. And I’m still trying personally to strike that balance of keeping up with what’s going on with social media and at the same time doing my legwork and telephone work as a reporter.  But we do Facebook, we have a Facebook page for Dan Rather Reports. I contribute to that page regularly, daily, sometimes more than once a day, and we use Twitter as well. Yes we use it for promotional purposes, but I have found that if you use your Facebook page only for promotion or even mostly for promotion, people get over to it pretty quickly, and they either stop coming or they ignore it. So you have to give value for time spent.
And we also use for research, to try to stay abreast of what’s trending on Facebook, what’s trending with tweets. We use it for research, also for promotion and also as an outlet for material, and my example would be that, forgive the personal reference, but I came upon a story about a week ago about the specifics of Hugo Chavez, how serious the cancer is. A very advanced very aggressive form of cancer and spoke to someone who is in a position to know, who raised the possibility that Chavez could not last until the scheduled election in October. We’re a weekly news program. This happened, I can’t remember, I think on Thursday or Friday between programs. So, we wanted to get that information out. I thought it was an important story, not the greatest story in the world, but an important story. And we also have our competitive pressure so what do we do? We very quickly put something on Facebook and Twitter, while we’re getting something put together for AOL which was kind enough to print it, a short three paragraph story about it, and so it isn’t just research, it isn’t just promotion. We use social media as a way of getting out news