Today’s featured moderator in our series of interviews leading up to PR+MKTG Camp Seattle on March 3 is Renay San Miguel.

Renay San Miguel started his journalism career with his hometown newspaper in Texas in 1979. He moved to television in 1985, anchoring, producing and reporting in Austin, Dallas and San Francisco before joining CNBC as a technology correspondent from 1997 to 2000. Following a stint with CBS MarketWatch, which included filing tech stories for the CBS Early Show, San Miguel joined CNN Headline News in 2001 as an anchor/tech reporter and anchored CNN Domestic. He also contributed digital content for CNN.com. After his 2007 departure from CNN, San Miguel founded Primo Media and now freelances in television/online reporting and media consultation.

Renay is a moderator for Session 1:

Impact: Understanding how social media is reshaping traditional PR’s and marketing’s principal roles and core competencies. In this session, we examine the impact of social media on storytelling, relationship building, branding, conversations and transactions.

Renay San Miguel Interview

Question: How much is social media the story vs. helping to deliver the story?

Renay San Miguel: The idea of social media itself being the focus of how news gets out will fade over time, as it becomes more and more mainstream. The sidebar stories regarding Twitter usage re: Michael Jackson, Iran, Haiti will be folded into the main stories. I’m looking for more stories that involve social media’s use in governmental affairs reporting; will citizens tweet events at a school board meeting (that print reporters aren’t covering anymore because of cutbacks) if they smell something fishy or underhanded? The local aspects of social media and daily newsgathering in the neighborhood/city level offer the most potential right now, in my opinion.

Social media methods are being used more and more to help gather news, but like any other potential stream or source of information, they have to be vetted. The information is in its rawest form on Twitter, Facebook, etc….not filtered through a journalist’s eyes when he or she arrives at the scene of a breaking news story, or a politician’s press conference, or a governmental body’s weekly meeting. Experience helps a journalist to know what to look for in a story and where the context is when a news event happens; what else is in the picture at a plane crash? What motivations lie beneath a candidate’s announcement, or a company’s business decision?

Question: Whether through brands or press releases, marketing and PR are about storytelling. Give me an example(s) of how social media has significantly impacted the way you tell stories about your company or client.

San Miguel: Please understand that most of my perspective comes from the journalism side of things. I have 31 years experience in print, broadcast and online newsgathering - and all of six months in PR. But I’ve worked with PR professionals all my career. I see social media presenting the same challenges and opportunities to the media relations community as they do for traditional news outlets.

When people asked me why I switched from news to PR, I told them that no matter what side of the fence you were one – public or client – you are telling a story. The best stories have a beginning, middle and end; they have arcs and characters. What social media does is put a new element – the public if you’re in newsgathering, the customer if you’re with a company – right in the middle of that message. News has always been a one-way storytelling medium, but not anymore. We’ve seen Twitter. Twitpics and Facebook provide the first glimpses into breaking news situations like the “miracle on the Hudson,” the Mumbai terror attacks, the Iranian election protests, Michael Jackson’s death, the Haiti earthquake. Those first images provided by news consumers were a big help in those stories, but many times traditional media still acs like social media is a nuisance or a fad. That attitude simply has to stop. Certainly, social media doesn’t represent the reinvention of news, but Twitter has become a very powerful tool in the storytelling toolbox. It’s another color on the palette.

The recent tragic deaths of four Lakewood police officers brought out another side of social media’s impact on journalism; the way the local media like the Seattle Times, seattlepi.com and broadcast outlets used Twitter (and in one case, Google Wave) to hunt down suspect sightings, police activity in neighborhoods, real-time reaction to major developments in a story that evolved quickly over a 48-hour period. All the news outlets may have inadvertently provided a model for how social media should be used in future situations; open up the newsgathering process to your readers/viewers, vet everything (trust but verify) and engage the news consumer.

I want to make clear that I didn’t use the phrase “trained journalist” because that phrase carries a lot of baggage these days. Anybody with a smartphone w/a camera can call themselves a broadcast journalist these days, but unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t consider that a bad thing. Point of view, accuracy and bias will always/have always been judged by the crowd; another pair of eyes and another source of video can come in handy, and I’m willing to give credit to whoever captured it.

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