Should Journalists Get Blocked on Social Media??
By Cha Cha Johnson
According to Forbes, by the end of 2018 “Social media has become the main source of news online with more than 2.4 billion internet users, nearly 64.5 percent receive breaking news from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram instead of traditional media.”
As a result of the increase in social media usage for news, researchers Lars Willnat and David Weaver found that “Eight in ten journalists use social media in their daily work.” With social media algorithms becoming more prevalent, people are also worrying about whether or not their news is actually what they want to see or what the algorithm assumes they want to see.
Personally, I think that journalists using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as their news platforms can both help and hinder journalism.
On one hand, it can help for journalists to use social media as a platform because news is able to travel much faster when it is posted via twitter or Facebook.
Being that news travels faster and further on social media, journalists are also able to start sharing stories before they are fully developed, which has its own pros and cons to it. However, it allows them to give updates and personal inputs as stories unfold instead of after. Using social media as a news platform has allowed journalists to gain faster access to their audiences as well.
“As a journalist, having a social profile allows readers to put a face to a name, and lets them get to know you on a more personal level. The hope is that this following will enjoy your work, not just the work of your publication, and then follow you as you move along in your career,” says SCU Senior Editor Kurt Wagner.
In the end, the best part about journalists using Twitter and Facebook is that it broadens the amount of sources they have to get their information from and the amount of communities they can reach.
While news moving much faster on social media can be a good thing, moving fast can also result in a lot of mistakes and even careless reporting. “The race to be first is real, and moving fast doesn’t always correlate with getting things right.” (Wagner) On top of this, because of social media algorithms and how frequently people post, news stories get turned around, and or “lost in the sauce”.
A lot of times journalists also get so caught up in what other journalists are talking about on Twitter and what news story everyone else thinks is important, that they no longer worry about whether the content is even newsworthy. According to researchers Shannon McGregor and Logan Molyneux, “For journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications.” Overall I don’t think that social media as a news platform is the problem; the problem is how its used.
