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It was an intriguing experience attending the Media140 Sydney conference, listening to professional journalists from predominantly large media organisations speak about how social media is changing how they work day-to-day.

Not surprisingly, the general consensus seemed to be that social media is profoundly changing the media landscape. There was a lot of discussion about how it’s changing and how journalists and media organisations are (or in some cases aren’t) attempting to deal with the changes.

I wasn’t in attendance for all of the sessions, but following are a few of my own highlights from what I did see.

Malcolm Turnbull (@turnbullmalcolm), the current Leader of the Opposition here in Australia (not a journalist of course), discussed how he uses different types of media, and how he currently uses Twitter. He thinks there is too much emphasis on the medium and people are forgetting it’s the message that is important, no matter what the medium.

I tend to agree with this, as I get quite bored of people talking endlessly in social media about social media itself. Having said that, it must also be said that I’ve talked a LOT about Twitter on Twitter myself. It’s all still relatively new, so day-to-day developments can still be engaging and surprising at times. No doubt the continual self-analysis will go on for some time to come.

Turnbull explained how he uses Twitter mainly as a broadcast medium for political messages, and hardly at all for everyday personal messages and conversation. This is mostly because politicians don’t have a lot of privacy and he likes to preserve the privacy he does still have.

When asked if he actually writes all his tweets himself, Turnbull said that he doesn’t and that he has an assistant tweet for him much of the time. I noticed that just a couple of hours after his talk, he posted this tweet from his BlackBerry relating to this:

“OK, to be clear: if a tweet is not written or specifically okayed by me, the assistant twitterer will initial it - eg “TT for MT”

Julian Morrow from The Chaser mentioned how during The Chaser’s controversial Make a Wish sketch, he watched the reaction to it on Twitter as it went live to air on tv, and got a pretty fair idea of how the next few days were going to go. The show was suspended from air for two weeks following the incident. Morrow also said he attempted to do some Twitter search mining into the reaction later on but found that very difficult. The development of more refined and in-depth social media search is surely going to be an area that will be developed in the future.

There was also and interesting panel (well more a string of speakers and a quick q and a) about social media lessons from the Iran election uprising. Riyaad Minty (@riy), Head of Social Media for Al Jazeera spoke refreshingly about that network’s use of Twitter, especially its monitoring during the post-election uprising. He spoke about how news organisations need to make sure they are part of the conversation during such events. They need to be doing such things as using existing hashtags on Twitter. They also need to filter and verify information from sources such as Twitter. It they don’t do such things, people will quickly go elsewhere for their news. He said news organisations need to embrace the real-time web, not ignore or fear it.

Stilgherrian (@stilgherrian) irreverently questioned what journalists actually do. When it came to the Sydney dust storm for instance, did many journalists simply repackage what had already been said on the real-time web for a good half an hour before the “industrial age” media machine started to crank up?

My experience of the morning of the dust storm was close to that. I woke up, looked out the window and saw the eerie orange glow. It was pretty early, around 6am. The first thing I did to find out more was to pick up my iPhone and search Twitter for conversation about it. There was already plenty. The first images I saw were from fellow Twitter users who were beginning to head outside in many different parts of the city. It was a while before I got any new information from more traditional news sources.

I’m glad I went to the conference. Although I felt like I’d heard much of it before, and discussed many of the issues quite a bit already, it was still good hear how various journalists are approaching the profound changes in their profession. It’s going to be an interesting next few years on the web.