Your grandma probably has a Facebook, tweeting about your day has become second nature, and your Instagram is probably a collection of your favorite memories selected especially for your closest 900 friends. With so much social media, you’d expect users to understand the do’s and don’ts of posting. But we all have those friends who use Twitter as a diary and Instagram like a mirror.
At South By Southwest, I attended a panel during the Interactive portion of the festival about Instagramming the News. The panel featured three professionals in photojournalism and photography technology: Dan Toffey, the Community Manager of Instagram, Associated Press Chief Photographer David Guttenfelder and Time Magazine’s Director of Photography, Kira Pollack. Toffey, Guttenfelder and Pollack covered a variety of topics concerning news-related posts on Instagram accounts. Toffey mainly talked about the general use of Instagram for photojournalism and how the company has seen this type of posting develop. Guttenfelder and Pollack focused on how the social media site has changed their respective publications’ use of photos and event coverage, as well as how Instagram has broadened their viewer platform. I gleaned many important tips from their presentation, however one fact hit me hard and has made a home at the forefront of my mind for many weeks now: Guttenfelder and Pollack both follow citizens in the U.S. and different countries — normal, everyday, not-so-prominent figures — to find out where the news is.
