Published: 15 April 2024
Last updated: 16 April 2024
Look, don’t get excited, just try to stay calm… but you are reading a column written by Australia’s first ever social media editor. Yes. I can hear your gasps of wonder and amazement. It was me. I was the first ever social media editor in this country.
It was 2010 and after a decade working as a journalist around the world, I returned home to Melbourne and found myself working for the biggest newspaper in the country, The Herald Sun.
Social media was growing in every single area of our lives and was destined to be a game-changer in the newsroom.
I soon realised that social media affected much more than the consumption and dissemination of news. Mastheads were bleeding from the loss of classified advertising and editors started to realise that every single person walking around with a smartphone was potentially a citizen journalist.
It was the dawn of the user-generated content (UGC) revolution.
Three months after my appointment, in March 2011, came my first real test of UGC. A massive tsunami hit Japan, sparked by an earthquake lasting six minutes and measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale. We watched in real-time as the wave crushed absolutely everything in its path, killing 20,000 people.
I worked for 22 hours straight, scouring Twitter and Facebook for people posting photos, trying to clarify what was happening and identifying any Australians either stranded or affected.
One of the central challenges was jokers posting photos that were either doctored or from other natural disasters just to mess with journalists and create their own sort of digital anarchy.
