We've written many times at GigaOM about how the media industry is being disrupted, and how that is being caused in part by the "democratization of distribution" that social-media tools such as Twitter and Facebook allow. Now a young journalist who works for Sky News in Britain has put the reality of that into words in a blog post at the BBC's College of Journalism website. In the post, Neal Mann describes how much his job has changed in just the past few years - and how a key part of it involves interacting with "a personalized wire service" of more than 2,000 sources that he has curated via Twitter.
Mann says that when he trained as a journalist five years ago, his use of social media was limited to posting the occasional picture of himself to Facebook, and Twitter "wasn't even on my radar." Now, he says, as a desk editor for the international TV network Sky News, the real-time information network has become a crucial part of the way he does his job. That job used to entail checking photo feeds, news wires, emails and reports from journalists in the field, he says - and now it involves checking real-time news reports and tips from sources on Twitter as well.
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