The symbiosis of media: Journalists find stories on Twitter

This is cool. Renai LeMay, a tech journalist for the Australian Financial Review (just now returning to CNET Australia as News Editor) attended our Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications event the other week. While he was there, he sent a message on Twitter asking if any companies had a good story to tell. Richard Slatter of Plugger, one of the companies showcased at the event, twittered Renai back. Renai found it a worthy story, and it appeared in the Australian Financial Review, the major business daily in the country, this morning as Plug in to keep tabs on directors’ board links. (See Renai’s telling of the story on his blog.)

This harks back to what I was talking about a couple of years ago on the ‘symbiosis of traditional and social media’, as illustrated in the Future of Media Strategic Framework we released then (as below). While many have compared social media to parasites on mainstream media by feeding on it, increasingly mainstream media finds its sources and stories in social media. Things happen and are seen in social media before they are discovered and disseminated more broadly in traditional media. Each has their role, and they feed off each other in a highly complementary symbiosis.

This will be a theme on the future of journalism panel at the Future of Media Summit 2008.