Jinah Seol, Journal of Internet Computing and Services, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 83-90, Feb. 2015
10.7472/jksii.2015.16.1.83, Full Text:
Keywords: Social news, networked journalism, wiketree, Facebook, Twitter

Abstract

This paper examines the rising value of social networked journalism and analyzes the case of a social news site based on the theory of networked journalism. Social networked journalism allows the public to be involved in every aspect of journalism production through crowd-sourcing and interactivity. The networking effect with the public is driving journalism to transform into a more open, more networked and more responsive venue. "wikitree" is a social networking news service on which anybody can write news and disseminate it via Facebook and Twitter. It is operated as an open sourced program which incorporates "Google Translate" to automatically convert all its content, enabling any global citizen with an Internet access to contribute news production and share either their own creative contents or generated contents from other sources. Since its inception, "wikitree global" site has been expanding its coverage rapidly with access points arising from 160 countries. Analyzing its international coverage by country and by news category as well as by the unique visit numbers via SNS, the results of the case study imply that networking with the global public can enhance news traffic to the social news site as well as to specific news items. The results also suggest that the utilization of Twitter and Facebook in social networked journalism can break the boundary between local and global public by extending news-gathering ability while growing audience's interest in the site, and engender a feasible business model for a local online journalism.

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