Everybody or Somebody? Assessing the impact of social media on newsroom organisational structures

Abstract

With social media’s increasingly important role in fast-paced news, there is a need to identify the occupational and professional implications of social media specifically in terms of jobs and roles in newsrooms. This paper serves as a preliminary enquiry into what social media jobs have been created in newsrooms under which job ti-tles. It explores trends associated with this and the tasks being carried out in those roles to assess the extent to which social media is ring-fenced as a responsibility. From this it is possible to query the wider impact of social me-dia on organisational structure in newsrooms. Two main newsroom models are identified: firstly, newsrooms that place an emphasis on everyone being responsible for so-cial media and secondly, newsrooms where social media
is a specified role. The study further serves to guide social media skills for inclusion in journalism training