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Hurricane Sandy Marked A Shift For Social Media Use In Disasters

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The way citizens are informed about potential emergencies, whether natural or created by individuals, has certainly changed over the years. We no longer live in a world where we depend on local stations representing three major television networks for information about impending threats or emergencies (Haddow & Haddow, 2014). We are now almost immediately informed by social media applications or alerts that are provided to smart phones by hundreds of news outlets. It’s been said that Hurricane Sandy was one of the first events where the government turned to social media applications before, during and after the emergency. It allowed them to reach the public and response partners allowing them to address the needs of the community while providing much needed information (Cohen, 2013). The news media is equally aware of the changing trends in communications and has embraced it in their daily news reporting for several reasons.
One reason that mainstream media has embraced social media is the fact that it allows smaller news …show more content…

(2014, September 24). How social media is reshaping news. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/
Cohen, S. E. (2013, March 7). Sandy Marked a Shift for Social Media Use in Disasters. Retrieved March 07, 2013, from http://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/Sandy-Social-Media-Use-in-Disasters.html
Greissner, C. (n.d.). News Agencies and Social Media: A Relationship with a Future? Retrieved from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/news-agencies-and-social-media-relationship-future
Haddow, G. D., & Haddow, K. (2014). Disaster communications in a changing media world. Amsterdam: Elsevier
ING Corp. (2014, June 19). 2014 Study impact of Social Media on News: More crowd-checking, less fact-checking. Retrieved from

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