Social media, Newsgathering and the Olympics

Abstract

London 2012 was always going to be billed as ‘the first social media Summer Olympics.’ When the 2008 games took place in China, a country known for internet restrictions, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were still in their infancy. The BBC demonstrated real innovation by showing tweets by reporters on a map of Beijing but some of the language just goes to show how new this all was, with an instruction page explaining ‘what is Twitter?’ Back in 2008, Twitter was generating a mere 300,000 tweets per day (now up to 340 million a day). News companies still had to explain what YouTube was, even as users uploaded 10 hours of video per minute. That has grown to 72 hours per minute in 2012, with three billion hours of YouTube watched every month. Facebook hit 145 million users in 2008, and in 2012 it’s closer to one billion users.