Hey Media, Here’s Where You Can Find Me
In the vicious cycle of social news, its often easier to keep your distance.
As a college student I want to be up to date on all things breaking news throughout my day. Thirty years ago, breaking news would come in form as a newspaper the next morning. Now, it’s a constant stream of push notifications and social feeds warping our perception of what is “breaking news.”
As the business model of news has drastically changed in the past 20 years, the way value is created does not place an importance on consumer well-being. Today, value of news content is defined by the community consuming the content, and this community can most often be found online.
Social platforms have for the most part figured out the golden formula to capture and maintain consumers’ attention to then monetize. It makes all the sense in the world that they would continue to develop this business model, as attention has become the scarcest resource in the 21st century. However, I find myself revolting against the news media business model on social platforms day after day.
Twitter uses the catch phrase, “It’s what’s happening in the world.” While yes, Twitter is where you can find almost everything that is happening in the world right now, there is also a lot of other junk that I find incredibly useless which takes away from the valuable 24 hours of attention I have each day. In addition to this, a non-partisan, non-bias, real time breaking news account which reports strictly the facts is a scarce commodity in the news media ecosystem. At a time when I am still developing my political ideology, I am looking for news sources to give strictly facts. From there I can feel free to develop personal views about societal issues. Although facts need context to make sense, I find that the social news media ecosystem enhances context to include bias and personal feelings. Oftentimes I feel as though it is impossible to form an opinion free from the views of others, as almost all news content is written with a right or left perspective.
With only 24 hours of valuable time in my day, I am continually looking for news media that is worthy of my attention. As a busy college student, I have found myself not consuming as much content as I should. After dissecting this further, I believe it is my confusion with the highly fragmented news media market and frustration with the opinionated social platforms that has me spending less time as a consumer. As for now, I wait till the morning to open my email inbox and read my morning briefings from theSkimm and the Wall Street Journal. While their news content may not be totally free from bias, I find them the best at summarizing news in a way that is easy to understand.
As my iPhone now alerts me to the startling amount of time I spend on social media each week, I have taken a step back and set parameters limiting my daily use. So far, I have found this helpful as I only consume only what I find to be valuable. So media, if you are looking to find me, it’ll be in my email inbox each morning reporting the facts.
