Connecting the World: Becky Anderson, CNN's ambitious social media anchor

CNN's Connect The World: a television news programme which tries to link seemingly unrelated global stories by exploring the impact an event in one place can have on people elsewhere.

"A labour of love (…) and a fairly lofty ambition," admits CNN's Connect The World presenter Becky Anderson, but one that through hard work, and tapping into a sense of an increasingly connected world spurred by the rise in social media sites, is successful.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, CNN leading anchor Anderson says the concept of the show, which links topics by time, geography and theme, is aimed at trying to engage the viewer.

"With 24/7 news channels the viewers got a lot of what might be perceived as fairly random stories being thrown at them without too much context (...) Take a story like climate change and rather than throw the climate change, Copenhagen debate story at the viewer one week and then have one of our newsgatherers in Brazil the next week trying to re-engage the viewer, we're trying to spend longer and get deeper and deal with a few topics in one hour and organise our newsgathering and planning bases accordingly," explains Anderson.

Part of the show, which is broadcast on weekdays at 9:00pm (GMT), allows viewers to submit questions to the day's guest interviewee via email, Skype, Twitter and online commenting. Anderson is a committed blogger on the site, driving much of this interaction with her own postings.

"We have to redesign the way we think as newsgatherers to make it [the show] work. The world of social media and microblogging is one we have to engage with as broadcast journalists or die. It's a world that the show has really adopted, not as just an add-on to the show, but our website is very much used to drive what we believe the viewers want," she says.

Anderson, who joined CNN in 1999, says Twitter has a had a significant impact on the way she works since she started using it as a newsgathering tool around six months ago.

"Twitter is a means to find out what's going on in a place before I get there, and it can give me some great contacts on the ground," she explains, adding that while she doesn't tweet herself she regularly searches Twitter and other social sites for leads.

"We use it on a day-to-day basis to make sure that we are up with the current debate in the microblogging world. But I'll also use it as a tool and a resource as a journalist to find out some of the better voices out there, who might help me understand a story better and use them as elements for a broadcast.

"We must engage or we will die. We have seen trends come and go, but social media isn't going to die."

Using social media to track news trends and breaking stories has also allowed Connect The World to be ambitious when the traditional 'news agenda' is slow and to offer a more viewer-driven line-up. The broadcaster and programme want to be part of the conversation outside of the show and newsroom, says Anderson.

"There are days when we have learned from the world of social media on our site what the reader wants more of tomorrow (...) which might not be a headlining story," she adds.

In this way and as part of CNN's coverage of the ongoing climate change summit in Copenhagen, Anderson is hosting an hour-long debate screen on YouTube.

Featuring panellists such as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman, the broadcaster has also been asking for questions from viewers. Close to 2,000 video questions had been submitted via the YouTube COP 15 channel and a selection will be put to the panel today from 1:00pm (GMT) as the debate is streamed live.

The programme will also air on CNN International tomorrow at 9:00pm (GMT) and throughout the week on Thursday (10:00 am and 11:00am), Saturday (8:00pm) and Sunday (2:00am and 10:00am).

By allowing viewers to ask the questions she hopes the debate will challenge the traditional broadcasting approach to climate change stories.

Media outlets struggle to sell the climate change debate, because they don't make it relevant to users, says Anderson.

"It becomes very political and apathetic. There are times when we focus to much on the political and not enough on how it affects our viewers," she says.

CNN and Anderson's programmes will increase their use of social media tools for both newsgathering and interacting with viewers in the New Year, she says.

As a broadcast journalist and host of such programmes and debates, Anderson has become "part ringmaster, part moderator and part journalist".

Recent news events have acutely highlighted the impact of social media on the role of the broadcast journalist, says Anderson, in particular the plane crash at Schipol airport in Amsterdam and the post-election protests in Iran.

It's a question of immediacy versus accuracy and whether the broadcast journalist can provide both or if there are alternative sources emerging, she says.

"Whilst the broadcast journalist may not own the first 15 minutes of a news story going forward, as we've seen in Iran recently, the story after the first 15 minutes and for the next two days has to be owned by the broadcast journalists and that's about accuracy," says Anderson.

"Our job will only get bigger and better so far as the accuracy part is concern. the decision we have to make is whether we take the immediacy from other avenues in the future."

For Connect The World in particular she would like to take the viewers' role further and not just read out emails sent in or comments left on her blog, but bringing in live video link-ups with viewers and video questions.

But these developments come with a crucial caveat: "We want to use tools that will make a difference and not just jump on a bandwagon."

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