Sharable Stuff or Shoddy Journalism?

Over the past decade, social media’s popularity has increased exponentially. What was once a few chat rooms evolved into MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter and the slew of sites that people are exposed to on a daily basis.

The nature of social media is to be current. The human desire to be in the know and be up to date is one thing that hasn’t changed over the past centuries, or even millenia. One thing to note, however, is that the hard news isn’t what spreads like wildfire on the web. It’s “shareable media”.

Scrolling through facebook for less than a minute, I found this great example of a “shareable media” post. It contains barely any newsworthiness, but people are intrigued by it. The video shows a guy tossing eggs at his mother over an extended period of time. It was posted on UNILAD, a men’s blog which has millions of followers.

For a video being posted less than a day ago, the statistics are pretty impressive. 337 thousand likes, 68 thousand comments and over 120 thousand shares. That means that this post has been seen by millions of people in a very short amount of time.

In the news industry, viewership is king. Neilsen ratings have been the standard for decades, and the ever-poweful “number one station” in a market is a title that everyone wants. Online, viewership can be calculated roughly buy looking at a post’s interactions.

The issue with this--like I mentioned earlier--is that hard news doesn’t spread like viral content. In order to compensate, news stations have begun to release more “sharable” posts, almost mirroring Buzzfeed or other sites similar in construct.

One example I found rather quickly was this list on WPTZ, NBC’s affiliate in Burlington, Vermont. The list goes through 25 inventions, offering tidbits of information about each item. It definitely isn’t newsworthy in my eyes, and seemed more fitting on a different site.

While I don’t necessarily agree with news outlets spewing out lists about where our favorite 90's child actors are or an article about Nickelodeon v. Cartoon Network, I can see where they are coming from. People need to be interested in the product you put out. On the web, that means competing with entertainment websites, and that means straying away from some journalistic standards for the sake of survival and relevance.