Photojournalists need to be making full use of social media, everything from Twitter to SmugMug not only to get their images out there but to make money.

1. ENGAGING
PHOTOJOURNALISTS
ON SOCIAL MEDIA
By Bradley Wilson
Journalism Education Association / National Scholastic Press Association
bradleywilson08@gmail.com
@bradleywilson09

2. YOU’RE TALKING
ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

5. PAGE 10 | FEATURE | HILITE | HILITE.ORG | FEB. 25, 2011 Social trends
Technological
developments
Negative headlines
Search
Putting a new face on everything
As Facebook grows, the social media site has changed work, play, interaction
The most visited site on earth
Story continued on next page
Internet time
Study shows social media has become the
most popular activity on the Internet
906
= 150 million hours
Social media
Games 407
E-mail 329
Portals 176
Instant
Messaging
160
NIELSON / SOURCE
facebook Home Profile Account
Did you know?
Facebook nation
In 2010, Facebook had
around 500 million
users.
That same year, the
population in the
United States was
around 310 million
The population in India was
1.2 billion.
=
=
CIA WORLD FACTBOOK AND
FACEBOOK / SOURCES
Come home, log onto the computer and browse Facebook: it’s a familiar
after-school routine for sophomore Shivani Bajpai.
“Everybody has a Facebook,” Bajpai said. “I think I was going to India the
year I got one and that way pictures could be shared.”
Bajpai is just one of many Millennials who is connected to the world’s
largest social network. Last year, Experian Hitwise reported that Facebook
outstripped Google as the most visited site of the year.
Mass media teacher Nicole Wilson attributed Facebook’s overtaking of
Google to the personal aspect of the social network.
“Who can you trust more than your friends?” Wilson said. “When you type
in ‘vacation hotels,’ into Google, you can get 200,000 hits. You don’t know
where they’re coming from; you don’t know if they’re credible. But you can
put a Facebook status up that says, ‘Does anybody have a good hotel sug-gestion
for...’ any location, and any of your friends…can respond to that.”
Facebook cited that its users spend over 700 billion minutes per month
on the site. Bajpai said she uses Facebook three hours a day.
“Facebook is addicting now; I kind of like everything about it,” she said. “I
like the fact that you can keep in touch with people. Like you can text them,
and you can call them, but Facebook is just a new form of communication.”
Wilson also acknowledged the growth of other social media sites.
“Social media is the way of the future,” she said. “It’s here; it’s not go-ing
anywhere.”
Last year researcher Soraya Facebook, inflating heads?
Mehdizadeh of York University
conducted a study of 100 col-lege
students, and found that
students with lower self-esteem
or higher levels of narcissism
were more likely to spend more
than an hour a day on Facebook.
She clarified that her studies did
not necessarily mean Facebook
made its users narcissistic.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN / SOURCE
Turn page Although Facebook’s addictive nature does not bother Bajpai nor Wilson,
two psychologists, Jean M. Twenge, PhD and W. Keith Campbell, PhD, wrote
an influential book in 2009 titled The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the
Age of Entitlement. They claim social networking sites allow people to
escape real friendships and simply collect “Facebook friends” or “Twitter
followers,” making them more self-centered.
In spite of such concerns, psychology teacher Peter O’Hara said Face-book
is simply an outlet for emotions no different from e-mail or tele-phone.
According to him, some people will always try to compensate for
low self-esteem by acting confident and extroverted, whether on Facebook,
on e-mail or on the phone. However, he said, the impersonal, accessible
Internet is where narcissists may feel the most comfortable engaging in
this behavior.
“You can sit in the comfort of your bedroom and put something out on
Facebook that you would never do if all of your friends were watching you,”
O’Hara said.
He said the same conversations or experiences are sometimes more dif-ficult
but also more enjoyable in real life than online.
In agreement, Bajpai said she is cautious of letting Facebook take over
her social life because her friends’ profile pages do not match up to her
friends in person.
“If you take Facebook (too) seriously, then you have an issue to begin
with,” Bajpai said. “Some people sit there on their laptop and just take
pictures of themselves for no reason. I think that’s a little stupid, but not
many people are like that.”
Up, up and away
2010 has seen both the rise and fall
of some social media sites
= Change in ranking from 2009
Top 10 most visited websites in 2010
1. www.facebook.com
2. www.google.com
3. mail.yahoo.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.youtube.com
1
6. www.msn.com
7. www.myspace.com
8. mail.live.com
9. search.yahoo.com
10. www.bing.com
Facebook’s season
t Facebook sur-passed
Google
as the most
visited website
t It accounted for
8.93 percent
of all visits
t Twitter grew
by 109
percent in
2010
t News Corp.
plans to sell
Myspace
EXPERIAN HITWISE AND MASHABLE / SOURCES

6. Legend, William R. Boone High School (Orlando, Fla.)

8. Silver Chips
Montgomery Blair High
School
2009

9. YOU’RE USING IT
YOU WANT LOTS OF INFORMATION
YOU WANT IT NOW
YOU WANT IT TO COME TO YOU
ADD GENERATION

14. YOU CAN ENGAGE
EFFICIENTLY AND
PRODUCTIVELY
IT CAN’T BE AN AFTERTHOUGHT
IT HAS TO BE PART OF WORKFLOW
RIGHT TOOL FOR THE RIGHT JOB

15. Facebook is a social
networking Web site
founded in 2004. Since
September 2006, anyone
over the age of 13 with a
valid e-mail address can
become a Facebook user.
It is now traded on
NASDAQ as FB and
valued at $17.89 billion
with more than 1 billion
active users.

27. SAN DIEGO – College students who use Facebook spend
less time studying and have lower grade point averages than
students who have not signed up for the social networking
website, according to a pilot study.

30. TM
Launched in July of
2006, a tweet is limited
to 140 characters per
post. Sort of like a real-time
service for
headlines.
Accessible online, in e-mail, on mobile
phones and through other services.
500 million registered users in 2012, who
posted 340 million tweets per day

36. 772,925 retweets, 293,922 favorites
200,000+ retweets
2,030,000 retweets, 3,419,000 favorites
http://favstar.fm/all-time-most-favorited-tweets

37. Pinterest, launched in March
of 2010, is a pinboard-style
photo-sharing website that
allows users to create and
manage theme-based image
collections such as events,
interests, and hobbies.
Users can browse other
pinboards for images, “re-pin”
images to their own
pinboards, or “like” photos.

39. Instagram, an online
mobile photo-sharing,
video-sharing
and social networking
service, was created
by Kevin Systrom and
Mike Krieger and
launched in October
2010. It has more than
100 million users.

40. Instagram enables users to
take pictures and videos,
apply digital filters to them,
and share them on social
networking services, such as
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr
and Flickr.
A distinctive feature is that it
confines photos to a square
shape, similar to Kodak
Instamatic and Polaroid
images.

42. SmugMug, launched in 2002,
enables users to sell their
photographs online. It’s
turnkey solution. You put
photos online and user can
buy them.
81 employees. Hundreds of
thousands of ecstatic
customers. 1,368,348,560
photos and counting.

45. Do galleries

46. Include
captions

47. Have fun

48. Flickr is an image-hosting
and video-hosting
site created in
2004 and acquired by
Yahoo! in 2005.
Photographers use it to share
photographs in their communities and
to get comments.

54. Video-sharing
services for
uploading, viewing
and sharing videos.
Many schools block
YouTube, founded in
2005. YouTube is now a
subsidiary of Google.
Vimeo, founded in 2004,
is a little more
‘sheltered’ and has more
than 3 million users.

58. TEXTING
Kids between the ages of 12 and 17 text a median of 60 times a
day — up from 50 in 2009. Girls take the lead as most frequent
texters.
SOURCE: Pew Research Center’s Internet American Life Project surveys, March 2012

59. Texting is the dominant daily
mode of communication
between teens and all those with
whom they communicate.

60. How frequently does the student staff
update content for its newspaper website?
2006 2010
SOURCE: College Media Advisers survey, spring 2010

61. GET ONLINE
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Flickr
Instagram
Pinterest
SmugMug*
Soundslides
Vimeo
YouTube
* You can make money!

65. By Bradley Wilson
bradleywilson08@gmail.com
@bradleywilson09