The revolution will be facebooked, broadcast and published

Abstract

Social media is increasingly embedded in our societies, in journalistic practice and in activism. A series of uprisings across north Africa and Arabia (the so-called ‗Arab Spring‘ of 2011) have been credited largely to social media, especially Facebook. As with the protests surrounding the Iranian election of 2009, the world‘s media have proclaimed that social networking is responsible, and that the way in which journalists work is forever altered by this new technology. In this article, a content analysis of news coverage and interviews with foreign correspondents are used to analyse the extent to which this is true. The article concludes that although social media is now embedded in all aspects of life in modern societies, including journalism, traditional methods of finding and telling stories remain intact, and the dominant form of journalism.