Q&A: Sarah Ryan shares her experience using social media to connect with people and find story ideas
By Miriam Hassan on November 3, 2023
Sarah Ryan is a reporter for Global Edmonton and has been working in the industry since 2012. Sarah reports on crime and court matters and shares how she uses social media to cover these stories.
Q: What social media do you prefer to use?
A: “I use X and Facebook. I use X to share posts about missing people, coordinating with local law enforcement whenever they send something out. It’s an area I try to use my platform to assist with.”
Q: How do you use social media professionally and or personally?
A: “I use social media to find people when a generic streeter won’t work. When you’re looking for someone that you know needs to have a certain experience or certain knowledge of something, but I’m not really looking for an expert. I am looking for kind of a Joe Blow citizen, but I need them to know a bit more than the average person walking down Whyte Ave.”
Q: What are the challenges you find when using social media?
A: “For a while, you weren’t allowed to block anyone, company policy. So, people would send crazy, hateful, or trolling kind of comments. The thought was just ignore it, but when there’s just constantly terrible comments on your story, that eats at your mental health and your well-being, and it’s super frustrating.”
Q: What are the benefits of using social media?
A: “The reason I go there is to find people, and it does generally work. Most recently, I used it to find people that went to the Heritage Classic cause I wanted to talk to them about what their experience was like. Could I have walked down Jasper Ave or Whyte Ave and looked for people, yes, but it’s a bit of finding a needle in a haystack those people aren’t necessarily walking down the street at the time I’m looking.”
Q: Is it necessary today for journalists to use social media as part of their job?
A: “A lot of time, people will send me story ideas. I get so many great story ideas just from perusing Facebook. I really think you do yourself a disservice by not having social media accounts, but for your mental health, I completely understand why someone would make that choice.”
Q: Do you find you have to take mental health breaks from social media?
A: “I don’t. I feel like I’m not as addicted to social media as others. On certain stories I would have to just be like I’m not going to look at the comment section. I’m always the type of person that wants to respond to ignorant, hateful comments and shut them down, which people don’t recommend.”
Q: What do you recommend students do when they enter the industry and start navigating social media as a journalist?
A: “Make sure that you have a work or a journalism account do not let it ever be your own account. You need to have boundaries. I would also say adding people as a friend on Facebook is critical. If you don’t add people as a friend, they will probably never see your message, or they definitely won’t see it the day that you messaged.”
Navigating social media can be a challenge, but as Sarah Ryan shared, it can be useful when creating stories or even finding story ideas.