English abstract
This study aims to identify the extent of using social media among journalists, understand and recognize the connection of using social media in workplace and the impacts on the professional performance as well as to identify the acquired knowledge and challenges journalists may experience in their jobs. This study has adopted a descriptive survey method to all the data through formalization and distribution of questionnaires. The sample of this study is comprises of (176) journalists who are working in daily newspapers in The Sultanate of Oman namely: Alwatan, Oman, Al Shabiba, Azamn and Al roya.
The study concludes a set of results; most notably those respondents are mostly preferring use Twitter, whereas the smart phones are mostly used by respondents to access social media. While Respondents mostly prefer to login to social media from home, one thirty of respondents are spend one to two hours using social media. The study also shows that social topics came on the top in the terms of sharing and following by the respondents.
This study has indicated that 35% of respondents are using social media for job. Social media have influenced the professional performance of 55% of the respondents. One of the most prominent effects on the professional performance of journalists by using social media was obtaining information and ideas from the pages/ accounts of some high ranked officials. Although most of the journalists are using social media, however about 39% of the respondents is often resort to, while a large number of respondents have doubt about the likelihood of these social media as a validated information source. Furthermore, the study shows there were no any training courses about how to deal with these social media. The results confirmed that only 26% of the respondents had specialized training in social media. This is beside the significant occupational burdens, the lack of devices with programs and the absence of Wi-Fi networks as main and prominent challenges that have been stated by the respondents which reduce the benefit of these social media.
