With the Internet being so much a part of everyone’s lives, especially the younger generation who doesn’t know a world without it, mainstream journalism has run into some hard times.

With all that can be found on the Internet within a blink of an eye, many journalistic tools that have been a mainstay of the world for 100’s of years are now seeing a decline due to the Internet. It is doubtful that you’ll ever see a young person these days even touch a newspaper let a lone read one. In fact it makes one wonder if they would even know how to read one.

Due to all these changes in journalism has begun to take a closer look at the various social networking sites that are out there to try and use them to their favor in order to stay competitive in the new landscape of media that continues to change on nearly a daily basis.

The manager of the New York Times has come to the conclusion that the only way that the Times is going to survive these changing times is to implement the use of social media networking and marketing. The New York Times understands that if they produce good and interesting news and use social networking to share this news that it will draw people to them and it will give those drawn to this particular news section to communicate and discuss with others about a particular news item.

In today’s world, journalists have begun to take advantage of whatever social networking tool they can get their hands such as blogging. Then they can go from there onto Twitter, Facebook or YouTube and give updates on what they’ve already written about on their blogs. In this way, they can keep many of their followers, especially younger readers, interested in the topics and news that has been posted.

Since as said before, it is very doubtful that young people ready newspapers, it is then wise for journalism to turn to these different social networks in order to get the younger generation to read the news and keep themselves informed about what is going on around them in the real world and not just get lost in a virtual world.

All of this is fine and does well, but the question still remains - how do the big journalism companies get any type of money out of such ventures? They still need to try and keep their companies afloat and with the decline in readers and incline in free Internet access it has become a daunting task in figuring out where they can get their revenue from.

A few big time journalism companies that have utilized Facebook by advertising and having “branded” pages on Facebook, such as Conde Nast, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are having success by offering users the opportunity to join fan communities which allows them access to news, photos, quizzes and blogs while also sharing all of this with their friends on Facebook.

Other companies such as CNN, ABC and CBS have even taken this idea farther by offering the user the ability to access all of their Facebook profiles, friends, apps, etc. from their sites without ever leaving their sites and actually going to Facebook. To show just how successful this can be, CNN already boasts of 1.87 billion page views a month. Those are staggering numbers.

Another example of media sites partnering up with social networking sites is PBS.org that offers an actual Facebook page on their own site, which they call Engage. This part of the PBS site encourages their users to create their own content, comment on posted content, upload photos as well as interview filmmakers and talk with actual reporters, live online.

To show involved the New York Times is, they not only have their own page on Facebook that directs users to their page, but they also have RSS feeds and about 20 feeds on Twitter alone. Along with Twitter they’ve also incorporated themselves into the LinkedIn social network that revolves primarily around business.

The New York Times has grown to understand the importance of RSS feeds and have seen how successful these tools are at directing traffic to their website.

Even National Geographic is joining in on the social media networking craze by having their own video page on YouTube. Which also list important National Geographic stories that have links back to the National Geographic website.

Even the long lived music video giant MTV has had to rethink how they do their marketing and are beginning to find ways to integrate their services through utilizing social networking tools.

The relationship of social networking and news outlets is in its infancy and so far looks like it could be a match made in heaven, but will that cohesiveness last? It is hard to say but it doesn’t look like the relationship is going to break up any time in the near future.