Social Media at The University Star

Questions for the Editor

On this page you can find an interview I conducted with our news editor, Lucciana Choueiry. There are 5 questions relating to the role social media plays in the ever evolving world of journalism. I chose to interview Lucciana because she is the head of the section that really is the heart of The Star. Without the hard hitting news she strives to report on everyday we would be little more than a campus magazine in my opinion. She also has a lot of experience under her belt with multiple internships in the news industry and is one of the hardest workers at The Star in my opinion.

In the video Lucciana will go in depth about how she believes social media influences how people perceive news stories. How we use social media to compliment the news and how we could improve on it at The Star. She also dives into the impact engagement or feedback on social media has had on her career and the way she approaches stories because of that. Finally she closes out with a discussion on the connection with readers that social media can foster or hinder. There's a lot to cover and if you can’t watch the video right now there's a handy accordion that you can expand with the transcript of the answers to these questions.

Being the social media manager I have my own perspective on these things and it was really interesting to hear her perspective on things. For me, It's really all about driving people to the website to read the stories and that's my main focus when I am packing information. For her, the main focus is telling the story as accurately as possible. When we get hate comments, they're never directed at the social media manager, it's always for the reporters. The feedback doesn't really affect me but I always hand it over and it's good to know that it's taken into consideration. It really seems like a different world to be a journalist even though we are working for the same organization. We have different perspectives, goals and reactions to various things facilitated by our social media platforms. Watch the video below to hear directly from Lucciana and click the button at the bottom of the page to read her latest stories.

A News Editors take on Social Media in Journalism

Questions

"I think 100% yes. I think most of the time, a story when you just read it for the first time, I mean, that's all it is: it's the words of the reporter with the extra voices from the quotes. But when it's on social media, you have the extra layer or the added layer of the comments that I feel like affect people's perspectives a lot. And I feel like we've been seeing that a lot with the election guide that we just dropped, and people's comments. I feel like it's changing people's perspectives on the story or having them do their own research and dig a little deeper."

"I think we do a really good job already. However, the only thing I would say we could change or add is to have reporters who are writing those stories be more involved with the social media aspect of when their stories are published. So, for example, we've been in discussion of having reporters do social media takeovers when it comes to them being out at the polls during election. Different things like that, I think, will engage readers better with both the story and the writer behind the story because I feel like sometimes it's easy for reporters to go unnoticed, and this might help."

"I think it plays one of the more important roles when it comes to stories. I would say it's directly on par with the design and visual aspect, to be honest, because I think first and foremost, the way we do it, I think it highlights the main point of the story right off the bat and the visual that people need to see. Then, secondly, I think what it does is allow for that engagement and the discourse around the story, which makes someone want to read it even more. At least for me as an editor, when I go into our Instagram and I see a story have at least five comments, I'm like, we made it. It's very rewarding to see engagement with a story, so I think it plays a huge role in promoting a story and making people want to read it, especially because a lot of people, when they're passionate about one of our stories, they'll also repost it to their story, and I feel like that's how we get those numbers and that momentum around the story."

"Definitely it has. I think multiple, multiple times, I get story ideas from the reactions I see readers give us. For example, when we dropped a story on the latest update on the marijuana lawsuit that Ken Paxton filed against San Marcos, we published that story, and the only and the first comment that was there was "What does this even mean?" And I was like, that is so real, what does this even mean? So then we decided to do a long-form story that was more legible for the average student to understand what this means for them. That's just one example of many, many times this has happened, where I see the reaction, I see what readers have to say about the story, and it gives me an idea for a new one. Or it also gives readers ideas for leads that they want to share with us to pursue, which we've seen a lot when we publish housing stories."

"I would say it's most of the time a positive impact on our stories. However, I do think that sometimes it edges on being a distraction only because often, as students and honestly just as humans in the 21st century, we have an attention span—I learned this in class—of about 8 seconds. So I think sometimes when readers look at the story or look at the post, they can easily look at the headline and just think they understand what the story is about without reading it. One of the worst things I think I've experienced as an editor is when we have reporters and we have writers who worked so hard on a story, and then we pick a headline, we pick a visual, and then all the comments are kind of asking questions that are answered in the story, and you can just tell that they haven't read it. That, for me, takes away from the writing and from what the news is. However, I think it does more good than bad."
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