Journalistic Usage of Social Media and its Professional Implications

The bourgeoning growth of social media has hugely expanded the scope of journalism, for,content generation and sharing havebeen extended beyond the mainstream media newsrooms.Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like have become central to the dissemination of news, and have created huge forums for exchange of views. For the User Generated Content (UGC), socialmedia sites have emerged as important news platforms for the public, and as news source for journalists. Social media platformshave created numerous tools for scanning the Web resources, which journalists find useful fordifferent journalistic functions. Besides finding story leads and sharing own work with audiences, journalists use social media tools to filter out useful information from the vast resource of the Web. This paper explores the journalistic use of social media in India and its professional implications.