Social and online media are often thought of as challenges to traditional broadcasting, bringing news quickly and without cost to a wide audience. But social media can be a useful tool for broadcasters, inform and enhancing programmes.
The Arab Spring has demonstrated this, with broadcasters using information from social media to build up a picture of fast changing events and being able to aggregate and validate individual entries to present a more authoritative and balanced view to a wider audience, as well as using social media to widen the debate about the key issues.
We have examined this in an article in the latest edition of our magazine, The Channel. You can download this article here