Welcome to the future of social news : Reuters ups its game and Tumblr writes about itself

The news organisation Reuters has steadily been increasing their efforts in the social media space, with the most notable step up until now possibly being the appointment of a social media in June last year. Anthony ‘King of Tumblr’ De Rosa took up the position from within Reuters and has been responsible for growing social media efforts at the organisation. This was clearly needed as journalists themselves are certainly no strangers to the benefits of social media, but direction needed to come from a centralised resource to show the news industry was readily accepting of social technologies. The most high profile venture since De Rosa’s appointment is the launch of Reuters Social Pulse, which just arrived this week :

Commenting on the launch, Alex Leo (Director of News for Reuters Digital) explained that the hub is “designed to show you the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web.” This is being done through a number of features on the site, that refreshingly focuses on the community of journalists online, as well as socialising news itself.

This is socialising news in a new way because it adds authority to the spread of news online. One feature of the dashboard features the hottest news – which isn’t necessarily the news that’s getting the most comments, tweets etc.. but is the news that’s being discussed by the newsmakers themselves, that Reuters follow :

One of the other most notable features is their graph that plots social sentiment against stock prices for tech companies, such as Google, Apple and LinkedIn :

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen efforts to combine social media with the stock market, as Derwent Capital last year launched a hedge fund that used Twitter to predict movements in stocks and guide their investments. But this is a great public facing tool that could provide a whole new insight into the effects of social media sentiment into a company’s actual performance.

The dashboard has a number of other features, unfortunately including Klout scores for the most social CEOs, which I think is a fairly arbitrary measurement, but it’s a great project nonetheless.

Tumblr writes about itself

In a more bizarre movement in social news, Tumblr this week started hiring a raft of journalists to cover the world of…Tumblr. That’s right, Tumblr is now considering itself a news product in its own right. Correspondents have been recruited from organisations including BlackBook Media and the Daily Beast. The 2 journalists that have currently been hired will be tasked with documenting the world of Tumblr users, with real, investigative journalism to provide insight into what’s going on within Tumblr. Jessica Bennett, one of those hired who came from Daily Beast and NewsWeek said “Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million, I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

This concept may be a little tricky to get your head around. First, we had social media socialising the news and allowing anyone to become a creator of content, and now those content creators will become the news themselves, with journalists dedicated to covering their stories. It is a complete 180 for the news industry, who not only first had to get used to the world of social media, but they are now reporting on it directly. Surely a big fat win for social media?