The role of social media is changing a lot of things - the way people communicate and share information and the way businesses and people interact.
While it’s not necessarily changing the way media is done, we at the Prince Rupert Northern View certainly recognize the impact social media has on the day-to-day lives of people and how they get their information.
We’ve had a Facebook group for a while now, but to be honest it wasn’t necessarily as top of mind as it should have been. That has changed - we’ve moved from a group people ask to join to a page people can like (search Prince Rupert Northern View). We also update the Facebook site when we update the website so that people can get the latest news from the north coast on their Facebook news feed.
We’ve moved our on-site commenting to Facebook so anyone with a Facebook account can comment and join in the discussion about any story we post, and we’re looking at the current Facebook site to see what ways we can better interact with you, our readers, through the site in the near future.
And the other side of the social media spectrum is Twitter. Twitter is something that seems to have blown up across the globe, with media outlets turning to it for stories from celebrities and the ability to track what is trending across the world. We, of course, have a Twitter account as well
(@northernview) and anything that goes on our site is sent out via Twitter to our followers.
Admittedly I’m not much of a Twitter guy (insert ‘dang kids and their new technology’ joke here). Fortunately our reporters are, and it allows us to do some pretty cool stuff that can be elaborated on as we go. On Monday, for example, Alan was tweeting from the Enbridge Joint Review Panel hearings, providing a live accounting of the proceedings. That has a lot of potential for other meetings.
Social media is certainly a new era in communications, and we hope you’ll join us going forward as we see just what it can do.