Social media can be a helpful tool for journalists as well as having some mixed effects on news distribution.
While it can be a helpful tool, there are some issues that go along with it. Journalists can instantly report just by using their smartphones and that is a huge impact social media has on journalism. Since news is so easy to share and almost anyone can call themselves an online journalist, it can be difficult to find real news.
The internet is flooded with “fake news” and social media platforms are where you are more likely to find those types of articles.
There are endless amounts of Twitter users who scout for fake news and expose them. Finding real news on social media like Twitter seems to be an issue especially since so many people can share the news and the far reach it has on audiences.
Although fake news is almost impossible to avoid on social media, platforms such as Facebook try to change their appearances and functions to prevent fake news from spreading.
It is important for social media platforms to acknowledge the fake news so they can prevent it from being shared to the mass audiences that use their services. Since there is a lot of fake news, the press can have trouble maintaining their credibility with their audiences. This can lead to negative relationships between the press and the public, so the platforms trying to fix this is a way social media is forced to align with journalism and news distribution.
This video demonstrates the positive impacts of social media on journalism while still thinking of the negatives. While there are many ways to distribute news digitally, it can be “thrilling or frightening”. There are so many voices to be heard and that can be good or bad with so much news to be told.
Social media can be a difficult place to locate reliable news sources. This infographic from the New York Film Academy illustrates how social media impacts news. Since many journalists publish without fact-checking, it becomes a struggle to find a reliable source. It is not always easy to be able to figure out if a news source is reliable, especially online. The graphic also shows how the use of social media has caused a further reach of where the news can be distributed. While the negatives remain, these are a few ways social media can be good, such as this one. The traditional ways of gathering news have become far less important since the rise of social media and will continue to decrease as technology improves.
News outlets can utilize platforms, such as Tumblr, that allows you to link all of your social media accounts on one page, so it is easy to access all accounts whenever necessary. This can be a good tool if all news outlets did this in order to improve accuracy such as seeing if all accounts are up to date, share the same news, and remain active in posting on all platforms. If a news outlet doesn’t share on Twitter but shares on Facebook, this can further damage the relationship between the news outlet and their audience.
While the rise of social media has helped journalism, it has also made some things much harder. As long as journalists responsibly use social media as a tool for news distribution, as well as fact check everything, it can be very beneficial to them and the news outlet they may work for. Social media has become a more efficient way to distribute and gather news, so journalists will continue to utilize it in any way possible.
