Social Media vs. Traditional Journalism
Is social media replacing traditional journalism or do they work well together?
Social media, as you can imagine, has monumentally changed the world of journalism, in ways that no one could have comprehended before its colossal rise.
Social media users often report on news via their pages before the story has even been assigned to a journalist, and this alone has completely altered the concept of breaking news.
Journalists don’t even decide what the biggest story of the day is anymore, rather, society does, and the news that goes viral is often produced by social media users themselves.
These days, people want real-time information, which is why so many of us turn to social media sites such as Twitter to stay up-to-date with the news. It was even found that two-thirds of U.S. adults get news from social media, demonstrating just how popular it is as a media outlet.
This then poses as a threat to journalists. If they have gathered a news story second-hand from social media, which is often the case, and they find a new angle that isn’t yet out there but sit on it for too long, they risk having the new angle reported on first by other competitors, or worse, social media users (dun dun dunnnn)!
Social media could therefore be seen as the rawest form of journalism — it provides eyewitness and first-hand accounts and is the fastest channel for breaking news.
The news of the death of Michael Jackson in 2009 broke on social media before any major news networks. TMZ.com, the American entertainment website, released the story first, before the mass of tweets about it forced Twitter to temporarily shut down. This was two hours before it was confirmed by the LA Times and Associated Press.
“We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke.” — Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder.
I remember this day; I was rehearsing for a dance competition at home in Guernsey, Channel Islands, when one of my team mates who was watching at the time stood up to announce that Michael Jackson had just passed away. She found the news on Twitter, not from a major media outlet. This is how powerful social media is as a tool for news reporting.
So could social media be replacing traditional journalism?
While some do believe that social media is a true form of journalism and could potentially be the future of it, others (including me) believe that social media and traditional journalism can work together in acting as message diffusing systems. By this I mean journalists can provide the news stories that social media is able to spread far and wide, or vice versa. In this sense, social media accentuates and compliments journalism, rather than replacing it.
In ways, social media has introduced a new layer to the world of journalism; interaction and communication with audiences, which journalists can seriously benefit from.
Some other advantages of this new dimension for journalists are that they are able to partake in wider newsgathering, reach out to sources directly, build personal relationships and increase engagement with audiences, just to name a few.
“New technology enables normal people to do reporting. But new technology also improves the monitoring quality of journalism as well.” — Sarah Hartley, the Guardian
So, I don’t believe that journalism is dying in the current world of social media. I do believe however, that social media in one way or another technically is a form of journalism, because it’s a channel that allows people to report on news. But, it is not replacing traditional journalism as such because more so, it can be used to enhance it, and the two can work together in informing the world effectively.
