Social Media — The Evolution of Journalism
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my book Generation F.
A big change brought about by social media is the storm that transformed journalism. By this, I mean not so much the looming extinction of the print media — a subject I will return to later — as the change in the profession itself, regardless of medium. All these years, journalism has been a calling and a profession in which you need something to say and a place to say it. Now, all these limitations have disappeared, and Facebook walls, forums, and blogs are flooded with millions of attempts at journalism, some of them admittedly quite successful.
For years, I have observed people writing on their Facebook walls, at first lacking confidence and sometimes even proper spelling skills, who have been turned by the extreme publicity and constant criticism into experienced writers, even journalists. Others gave up, while others did not change their style and remained completely isolated from their fans, writing only for themselves and whatever followers they had left.
The immense pressure of publicity and the fact that, for the first time, social media allowed us to react instantaneously and interactively to every word being written are
THE TWO TRUE FACTORS THAT TRANSFORMED THE RAPIDLY EVOLVING PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM
– the way we write, where we write, and who we write for…
The years when a TV channel could air a report or commentary from the position of the highest authority and voice its truth without allowing the other side to defend its own are gone forever, and nothing can ever bring them back.
Of this, I am certain.
The interactive quality of social media and the Internet as a whole has transformed both print and TV journalism, putting my writing colleagues in the position to imagine, even as they are composing a text, the avalanche of comments that will come under it and, by doing this, has raised the standard for the entire profession.
Generation F is about social media and the world, the people who run the world and how they feel, and how we feel during our transformation from Homo Sapiens to Homo Socialicus.
