Social Media & Televised News

In a previous blog, I spoke about the differences in the current uses of social media in Spain and in the United States. You can find the blog here: Public Relations Practice: U.S. vs. Spain . In this post, I claimed that Spain was behind in terms of social media use by public relations practitioners and businesses. However, earlier this week I realized that they were also up to date with other uses for social media. I would like to change my judgment of Spain: yes, the United States is ahead in social media use because we have more or less pioneered it, but Spain is doing an amazing job at catching up. The reason why I say this is because there are many other aspects of Spanish life that are incorporating social media that mimics a lot of what the United States is also just starting to do.

As my blog title suggests, the practice of combining social media and televised news to create a real-time open dialogue with viewers is something very fresh that isn't utilized by all news outlets. In New York City, I get all of my news from the PIX11, a channel that uses Facebook and Twitter comments from viewers both in its morning and evening news broadcasts. Often, the reporter will pose a question through the PIX11 News web page and by the end of the segment, the reporter will read off viewer responses straight from the web page. I haven't seen this used by many other news stations and it is one of the reasons why I like watching the news on this channel.

This is why it struck me when I was watching a TeleCinco news broadcast and noticed that at the end of one of their stories, the reporters began reading viewer responses from Facebook and even Twitter (the latter being a site that I first believed wasn't heavily used yet). Given that my host family only watches news on TeleCinco, I can't say for sure if other channels are using this strategy of bridging the gap between viewers and reporters, but I definitely commend TeleCinco for taking such a modern practice and applying it to its broadcasts despite social media still growing in Spain. I wouldn't be surprised if this even drives more people to sites such as Twitter just so they could feel like they are a part of the dialogue. They are using social media for the exact reason it was created, to make connections.