The impact of social media on newsroom operations in the UAE

الملخص EN

Social media can be defined as a class of online interchange channels dedicated to group-based information, content-sharing, connection, and association (Asur and Huberman, 2010).

Several prominent social networking venues include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Media practitioners, in particularly news editors, have taken these platforms to gather, report and share stories to their audience.

The goal of this paper” The impact of social media on newsroom operations in the UAE” is to determine the influence of social and computerized media on the way newsrooms broadcast their news and to investigate the new tasks that have been operated by news editors in the newsroom.

The researcher clarifies the reasons that underlie editors’ decisions to turn to social media platforms and the consequences that these applications have had on the news making practices inside several newsrooms in the UAE. The literature reviews reveal that as a result of social media elements in the news industry, news operation goes through a transformation, causing audiences to demand quality over quantity.

Also, collecting data and qualitative interviews were conducted to study and gain insight into news editors’ routines and their everyday usage of social media platforms. The conclusions of this article suggest that strategies adopted by the UAE newsroom operations are aim to help the delivery of services and increase their custom base. These observations carry important professional and ethical implications for news editors navigating today’s news making industry, and show how technological and semiprofessional aspects are tightly linked