The advent of social media has already changed the face of journalism – but as the frenzy of media activity surrounding the election kicks off, Gaby Hinsliff wonders whether anybody will actually be listening

The wedding reception was in full swing at a Cheshire country house hotel when the helicopter swooped in over the trees. As Tony Blair stepped out, the bride and groom secured an unexpectedly interesting shot for the album.

The hotel was chosen as the only secure venue available for an interview during the campaign. But conducting The Observer’s 2005 election grilling of the prime minister at a table overlooking the croquet lawn, without a voter in sight, was nonetheless faintly surreal. We spent much of the interview trying to discuss when Blair might quit; he spent it doggedly ignoring the question.

That day lingers in my memory as a metaphor for the modern campaign trail: a circus descending from on high for a photo opportunity here or walkabout there before ricocheting off somewhere else, leaving baffled voters trailing in the slipstream. Party leaders spend vast amounts of time and money on this, yet little, if any, of it makes the papers. The entire campaign quickly becomes a battle between competing agendas: reporters seeking something novel and unexpected versus politicians grimly repeating the same message in a vain attempt to cut through.

Perhaps logically, the public’s response is often to switch off. Sitting through focus groups of floating voters in 2005, I was struck by how little news ever reached them; their views seemed based on past impressions of the parties, and what had seemed like seismic events inside Westminster went completely unnoticed.

So, as the 2010 election looms, can we do things differently? The Conservatives have considered scrapping the traditional ‘battle bus’ model, where journalists tour the country with the leader during the final campaign, and all three parties are experimenting with viral and virtual alternatives to knocking on doors.

Some media organisations, facing newly tight budgets, are also questioning the value of the travelling circus. One leading new media publisher suggested recently that there was no need for his reporters to leave the office when they could sit at a screen monitoring TV and the blogosphere. All this creates a culture of second-hand reporting that fundamentally threatens the idea of journalist as eyewitness.

Not all new media, however, will be so controlled. This may be the election when citizen journalism comes of age: an ordinary individual filming a politician in an unguarded moment on a mobile phone, then collaborating with a conventional reporter to publish the material widely, could radically extend the reach of the traditional media. One Cabinet minister has talked about a ‘Stingray election’, where, in the words of the children’s TV programme, anything could happen in the next half hour. Scandals, hoaxes and outright lies may break on blogs, spread virally like wildfire and – if generated from unregulated sites hosted in overseas jurisdictions – often prove difficult to stop.

The influence of new media should not, however, be overestimated. ‘Lone wolf’ bloggers like Guido Fawkes have claimed significant scalps, but it took the deep pockets and extensive human resources of the thoroughly mainstream Daily Telegraph to deliver the one genuine earthquake of this parliament: the leaking of MPs’ expense claims.

A more likely scenario for this election campaign is that online aggregators – sites that collate information from different sources – will come into their own. Swamped by more information online than they can comfortably process, readers will increasingly seek sites that can filter or tailor news to help them make sense of the cacophony. They may also turn to collaborative sites such as Conservativehome.com, designed to reflect grassroots views rather than regurgitate the standard party line.

Meanwhile, social media sites that can quickly amplify and mobilise mass opinion, such as Twitter – home to the recent protests over alleged homophobia in the media – will be irresistible, if unscientific, shortcuts for journalists seeking to test public opinion, as well as for politicians trying to generate campaigns.

But the biggest difference in reporting the 2010 election compared with 2005 will be a simple one: speed. The advent of dedicated news websites and television channels created a voracious appetite for breaking stories – and the new government initiatives necessary to feed them – since viewers will watch for longer if headlines keep changing. Politicians may find that one campaign announcement is overtaken by the next before the public has even registered it. Since a scoop can appear on Twitter in the time it takes to type 140 characters, newspapers and news periodicals will increasingly see their material rendered out of date by faster rivals before they go to press. Comment and expert analysis, which are less perishable, may become increasingly important as a result.

This acceleration of the reporting process is likely to be intensified by developments in polling. The instant tracking polls roadtested by YouGov at the party conferences, providing a public response to keynote speeches within 20 minutes, are likely to become more widespread. And the next logical step is continuous polling, with rolling questions constantly testing public opinion on salient issues throughout the campaign. It would be like eavesdropping on a national conversation. And once politicians can monitor the impact of everything they say in real time, how will it affect their messages?

For reporters, the need for speed jeopardises both accuracy and depth. Genuinely investigative reporting is a slow, expensive process that media organisations are increasingly reluctant to fund and that reporters writing simultaneously for both paper and web have increasingly less time to do. The result in 2010 may be that many more small stories will break that the traditional media have missed – a gaffe here, a row there – but bigger, more serious stories will never be unearthed.

The intriguing question is whether all this affects the outcome. News stories can make or break governments, yet the debate over newspapers’ influence often concentrates on editorials. In fact, despite claims that it is “The Sun wot won it”, there is a wealth of evidence showing that newspaper editorials are effective largely only where they follow readers’ existing views. The Sun came out for David Cameron because it believes its readers are going to vote Tory, not because it expects to persuade them.

As for new media, despite the debate over what the former Cabinet minister Hazel Blears called the “vicious and nihilistic” tone of some blogs, the most interesting model now emerging is one that barely requires a medium at all – and certainly not an editorial voice. On social media sites, MPs now interact openly with the public and journalists without the context of a newspaper or broadcast. When the Home Office drugs adviser Professor David Nutt was sacked in October, the science minister Lord Drayson tweeted that he was “looking into” the matter.

I tweeted back asking what that meant; he suggested that he was questioning why he had not been consulted. Anyone following our Twitter feeds did not have to wait for the next day’s Observer to realise that there were differences of opinion within government about Nutt. For some readers, such conversations in online public space may increasingly come to replace the consumption of conventional media.

This election campaign is likely to see many more MPs seeking to sidestep traditional media and regain control of their message by blogging or tweeting. Self-publishing allows them to comment and debate without being filtered by journalists; their words cannot be misquoted or spun, and they can rebut any use of their words in a context with which they disagree. The result is a levelling of the playing field, with journalists increasingly held accountable.

Yet it is worth remembering that only a relatively small part of the population now engages with politics in such novel ways. For many, arguments about who said what on Twitter are the equivalent of helicopters buzzing overhead: a distant irritant. The main struggle for both politicians and reporters in 2010 remains as it was in 2005: simply to be heard.