LEADERSHIP
Can you remember when
social media became an
integral part of your life?
For me, it was right before
university—I signed up
for Facebook to keep in
touch with my friends
from secondary school
and to meet new people
at my university. Since
then, Instagram, Snapchat,
Twitter, Periscope, LinkedIn,
Tumblr, and a plethora of
other social media platforms
have sprung up to contend
with people’s ravenous
want to be connected
through technology. But can you remember when
social media became an
integral part of media? News
media, to be exact. No longer
is breaking news reported
by a TV journalist showing
up after the newsworthy
event has happened to
offer a recap—now, often in
140 characters, people are
informed of many events as
they happen, with pictures
and videos to prove it.Social media was how many
of us found out about the
hostage situation in
Sydney and the
birth of the
Duke and
Duchess of
Windsor’s
two
children.But social media is just the
platform: the disrupting
technology in news reporting
really is the smartphone from
which the updates come.“There is always someone
there with a smartphone,”
said Alex Hartman, Founder
of Newzulu, a crowd-sourced
media company. “It’s a new
age of citizen journalism,
where anyone’s breaking
news, photo, or video can
be splashed across TVs and
computers around the world.
We’ve capitalised on this
fundamental disruption.”Hartman began his career in
film and television licensing,
quickly becoming an expert in
copyright law through his own
business. His fascination with“Because of the pervasiveness
of the Internet, everyone can
be a publisher, and everyone
can create content. But it’s still
important to have credibility
in journalism. Newswires
around the world play a very
important role.”