If you look around the desks at Sky News, and for that matter many other newsrooms, you’re likely to find some people browsing Tweetdeck, Qik, Flickr, YouTube & Facebook.  And no they’re not skiving, they’re in fact doing a great job.  We’re not going soft in our 21^st year at Sky News, this is the world of breaking hard news in the 21^st century.

When I started at Sky as a TV output producer in 2000, our sources were 4 news wire services, 2 TV agencies and our correspondents around the UK and the world.  Now there are millions of lenses recording images of our world, millions of bloggers publishing to the web, millions of potential sources.

Eyewitnesses have always been crucial to the job of journalism.  Now many of them have cameras, even more of them are online, and any one of them could get the scoop of the year, and that’s exactly what happened at Glasgow Airport on a Saturday afternoon in June last year.  As a result, Sky News’ winning entry for News Coverage at the BAFTA Awards contained not a single frame of video shot by a Sky News cameraman.

The first sniff of a story is as likely to come in a blog or in a Twitpic as on a news wire. But no matter the provenance, the basic rules of journalism apply: Just because it has a million views doesn’t make it true. Who says a blog has to be balanced?  And beware the re-tweet.

We’re talking about copy-tasting in the world of new media, and it’s just one example of how the culture of the newsroom is changing.  Another sits just across from my desk.  She’s Ruth Barnett and she’s our Social Media Correspondent at skynews.com. Ruth is the principal human face of our activity inside the social networks, which is the best place not only see many stories breaking, but also to see how topics are trending.  She finds stories, case studies and even conducts interviews through social networking.  All that work doesn’t just stay on the website, it feeds all the other platforms serviced by Sky News.  Social media added an important layer to the coverage of June’s anti-government protests in Iran.

It’s not just a news gathering tool, we regularly use social networking tools to break news. Through microblogging we gave our audience the fastest possible breaking analysis of a live event like Prime Ministers Questions.  At the recent G20 protests in London, we had 7 separate sets of Sky News eyes and ears on the ground capturing minute by minute developments in text and pictures with nothing more than their mobile phones.  If they had been holding a TV camera in that situation, they would have been in danger.  We have been streaming video from mobile phones when a satellite truck or broadband feed hasn’t been available.

Social media is knocking down the ivory towers of 20^th century broadcasting, and blurring the previously well-defined roles of audience, broadcaster, publisher, provider, customer.  It’s an exciting world to be in, and we’re proud to be in the middle of it.

To learn more about Social TV and its impact on broadcasting visit the Social TV Forum 2010 (www.social-tv.net).  Book your place now click here