The BBC & Braided Journalism

Peter Horrocks, the BBC Global News Director has told his staff to make better use of social media  and to become more collaborative in producing stories.

The Guardian quotes him as saying, "This isn't just a kind of fad.... I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary", he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

According to the Guardian, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools for news reporters.

It's funny. This morning, I was writing a piece for my new book that social media, now about a decade old, is at the end of it's beginning phase, a phase that has caused great disruption to just about all institutions.

We are now at the beginning of a new phase, a phase of normalization, one in which the tools of social media  start being adapted by people just to do their jobs. We will stop using the tools to talk about the tools themselves, and just use them like we use telephones and computers, to do our work and communicate with others.

A decade ago, traditional media disdained social media, occasionally ridiculing it. They are laughing no more. In major events, where fast-breaking news has occurred social media has played an increasingly vital role: Haiti, Iran, Gaza, US Air 1549 on the Hudson, cops shooting a New Year's Eve reveller, the Sczhwan Earthquake.

At a time when the media is hobbled by 20 years of budget cuts that have fragmented their networks of stringers, correspondents and affiliates, citizen journalists with mobile devices have become the feet on the street of the world's news. We have, for the most part, been fast and accurate, in our reporting.

Yet we cannot replace traditional news institutions. They remain the professionals. We don't get invited to White House News Conferences. We don't get attached to infantry units in war zones. We do not have time nor inclination to dig into databases and record logs to uncover acts of corruption.

The BBC is moving toward what I call Braided Journalism, the convergence of traditional and citizen journalism into something new and potentially superior for news coverage than anything that has preceded it.