Is Social Media Killing Journalism?

In this modern day with the dominating presence of social media, it has led to alterations happening in the industry of journalism. Social media has added challenges to a profession already filled with competition, legal restraints and constant changes. It enables anyone to be a journalist, causing much of the news we read online to lack reliability or accuracy.

I believe that social media has beneficial elements and has helped to contribute to the modern journalism we see today. However it is causing traditional print journalism to decline in demand and popularity, and therefore we could be seeing the death of print journalism. Conversely as technology develops we have to accept the changes that have led us to ‘modern journalism’.

Social media means we are able to get our news quicker than ever, but do the disadvantages outweigh the advantages? I want to examine those changes in the form of pros and cons to see whether they have benefited journalism in any way.

$Image from Pexels.com

Pros

• Easy to access- People can access news far quicker than traditional news. They just need to turn on their device to access news, instead of having to go and get a newspaper or magazine from the shops. In recent months 87.9% of adults in the UK have used the internet (45.9 million), in comparison to 86.2% in 2015. In the world there are 3,424,971,237 internet users out of the worlds population of 7,432,663,275, which has increased by 7.5% from 2015. With this vast amount of access there has been the growth of popularity of social media, with an estimated 2.34 billion users worldwide, in comparison to 2.14 billion in 2015. Therefore its dominance shows that it is a new platform for which news can be spread and shared.
• Cheap- Accessing news via social media is frequently free, unlike most print journalism.
• Quick- Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow for information to be shared between users at such a fast pace, meaning that the public can receive the news virtually instantly. Research shows that 30% of 16–24 year olds used social media to consume news in 2014. This statistic grew by 17% in 2015, showing that these social media sites are growing in correlation with news telling. However obviously this is just information collected on one particular age group.
• Interactive- Social media allows for news to be more interactive, which allows for the message of a story to be enhanced. It also means that emotions can be built through pictures and videos, emphasising the story.
• Presence- Often when an event takes place, members of the public are there with phones at the scene quicker than a journalist with their cameramen, then posting the information on social media. Tweets and Facebook posts are now often included in modern day stories, especially as it is a quick and easy way to see peoples reactions, as well as gaining evidence and information on an event that took place.
• Personal- Social media allows those with news to spread it before it is documented by traditional media. In this example of the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton on the 16th November 2010, the news was tweeted by Clarence House. The post received over 1,200 re-tweets before the news broke over traditional news mediums. Therefore the news spread quicker and came directly from the royal family.

• Promoting- People may not be using their time on the internet to search for online news, but news can still get to users by journalists sharing and promoting stories and articles. As you can see below from the Twitter examples below reporters, journalists and news television presenters have used social media to link and share their news stories.

Jon Snow is a journalist and television presenter, who has been presenting the Channel 4 News since 1989

Katharine Viner became the first female Editor-in-Chief at The Guardian on 1st June 2015

Harry Hogger is a reporter for the Dorset echo

• ‘Crowd sourcing’- Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired Magazine who came up with the term ‘crowd sourcing’. It is the idea that you can put a question out to the world using social media, and people can answer back. This is very useful for gathering information and is hugely valuable when a news story relies on eyewitness information.

“I like to think of the online community as kind of the building block of crowd sourcing. It’s what the corporation is to the industrial era. It showed that people could come together and self organise into productive units. Which once took managers and a corporate hierarchy can now be done in the context of the community”- Jeff Howe

Cons

• Death of traditional news- As more and more people use the internet to access the news, this is leading us towards the death of traditional printed news. Although many newspapers can still perform online this still means loss of jobs for many.
• Anyone is a journalist- The ability for the voice of a regular person to be heard by millions of people within seconds on social media, has taken the real meaning behind being a journalist away. People with no training or knowledge of news and journalism are able to influence many just by clicking ‘tweet’ ‘post’ or ‘send’. This is very dangerous!
• Limitations- Some social media platforms have restrictions on the number of characters that can be used, such as Twitter which limits to 140 characters. Traditional news allows for elaboration and a lot of information to be provided for the reader, whereas much modern social media does not allow for this.
• Newsworthiness- News has the objective of informing the public on information that will be beneficial for them to know. However as online news becomes more popular, it has seen the need for stories to be written constantly, causing much news to lose its newsworthiness. It seems it is becoming more about quantity than quality in some cases.
• Distrust- I find that I am constantly clicking on links when on social media to ‘news stories’, however I have found many of them to be false. Although it is not professional journalists that make these posts, it adds to a growing distrust of news shared on social media as it gets harder and harder to distinguish what is truthful and what is not.

More Facebook users engaged with top fake election news than most popular real stories, report says

• No journalistic control- This leads on to the fact there is no control over what we see in our feeds by those in news, it is purely down to those in ownership of the site. I doubt they sift through the many articles and news stories to see what is true or false, or even make sure that everyone sees news on their feeds.

With this I leave you to make your decisions of whether social media has changed journalism for the better or not. It is sad to see that soon it could be the death of print traditional journalism, but when the alternative is free and instant, it comes as no surprise that our demands have shifted.

We as a nation in particular, have got so used to having everything handed to us, which is easier than ever due to the rise of the internet and therefore we have become lazier. We can ponder over whether it is laziness or the evolution of news that has caused this change.