Bringing the Internet to Radio

Background:
Social media and user generated content gets bigger and bigger. There are indications that traditional media wants to integrate the interactive potential of these new mediums to adapt to the new media landscape. Swedish radio has already begun investigating what change is needed presented in Journalism 3.0. As we have seen recently with terror attacks in Norway and revolutions in the Middle East, social media channels are becoming more and more important information channels, especially when dealing with governments exercising censorship. We therefore believe that monitoring the Internet for information will become even more important in the future.

Problem (problem area):
How can Internet content of journalistic value be found, processed and incorporated into the radio medium?
- Considering the Internet as a geographic region, can the regular journalistic process from foreign correspondents be applied (and modified), and can it be divided into subregions?
- What tools and competencies are required?
- How will the process and presentation differ between areas of political-, music- niche- and overall news journalism?
- How can radio manage to keep the brand identity of reliability (SR) when introducing this new concept?

Suggestion/idea:
Web correspondents working full time with monitoring (through social media monitoring tools) and sorting online information for the radio shows. This scenario treats the Internet as a geographic region to monitor and report on. However, the Internet is divided into subregions of:

World news (monitoring Twitter etc. for events such as earthquakes etc)
Local news (geotagged Twitter and Facebook updates lets the radio show report on the latest news for a specific location)
Niche content (contacting bloggers with niche expertise to co-produce radio shows, or browse the web for the latest niche news)
“Mainstream” music and entertainment (monitoring YouTube for new artists and music, exploring different genres, latest gossip about artists etc, current trends)
Live webstreaming (could be traditional video streams or other types of live streaming information, perhaps related to online gaming)

We will also look into the implementation process of this new concept.

Method:
We’ll start by doing a literature study mainly based on Internet resources because of the young nature of this focus area. We will also look into already existing social media monitoring tools before we start to sketch on solutions.

Presentation:
We’re planning on producing a “fake” radio show, portraying our idea about the future in radio journalism along with images of our concept.