“Social media has transformed journalism quite significantly in some ways, but I’ll begin by arguing against myself,” says Lewis. “I think there are some ways in which we massively overstate the impact of social media – and Twitter in particular. “If I think of the big three investigations in the UK over the last few years, phone-hacking, MPs’ expenses and WikiLeaks,” continues Lewis, “none of these were generated through social media. Those last two DID have a significant digital element – they were stories of the digital age – but they weren’t social media generated stories.”
Paul Lewis, Special Projects Editor at the Guardian”