Instagram for Dummies
Or The Time I Cried Over Cats
Instagram can be one of two things. A mundane social media platform, used for brunch pictures and workout videos, or a fierce news tool, used to make cognitive change.
The key to mastering it is to find out where you fit on the spectrum. As technology continues to develop, journalists have to keep finding new interesting ways to keep up with development while also maintaining their status as serious professionals. Lately, that means using social media as a tool for news broadcasting in any and every way possible.
Unlike platforms like Twitter and Facebook, Instagram hasn’t been able to pull itself forward as a serious news tool as of yet. My theory is that the audience that Instagram caters to, just isn’t as interested in news coverage. Instagram, as I stated, has been the titan for aesthetically pleasing brunch photos and pink skylines over the water. While they have introduced a budding video feature, it just hasn’t caught on much.
Instagram users don’t seem to be interested in breaking news or videos of up and coming social issues. Even the advertisements that appear on Instagram seem to be mostly game ads or shopping websites. I can’t see Instagram being a place for serious news when I scroll past a feature story and then immediately see an advertisement for one of those “skinny teas”.
Celebrities have made Instagram a mobile gossip site. A place to post the highlight of your day and casually leave out the bad parts. No fires in the Bronx, no missing child updates, no Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment news. Just millennial pink and perfectly poached eggs. It’s this very assessment that led me to be perfectly comfortable covering a story about a glorious pet adoption on Instagram.
I love animals and I love advocating for them. But fuzzy animals don’t go quite far on Twitter and Facebook as they do on Instagram. Big eyed puppies and new born kitten pawing at a camera lens are exactly the images that fly on Instagram and get noticed. However, this isn’t by any means a definitive classification of Instagram. If the site develops into something more, so be it. I just don’t see it happening any time soon.
