Social Media and News Reporting

Abstract

Social media has changed how people find out about the news, how they access the news, and how the news is made. News gathering and news reporting has undergone a process of radical democratization, but critics assert that the quality of news reporting has been sacrificed along the way (Streitmatter, 2012). Many who have been in the business of journalism for their entire lives have lamented the fact that, "Now that just anyone can report the news, they are having just anyone report the news."

Overview

In little more than a decade, social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook revolutionized the way society stays current with world events. Prior to the advent of social media, most people relied on newspapers, radio, and television news programs to find out what was going on in their communities or around the world. Now, people frequently find out about major events on social media before they hear about them on television, and certainly before they read about them in the newspaper. The speed with which news can travel via the Internet explains why so many more people now get their news, or at least learn of it initially, via social media (Zion & Craig, 2015).

Large newspapers used to have an evening edition in addition to the morning paper, but this has now become rare, and most papers that continue to operate are printed only once a day. For many people, hearing about an event or witnessing once often had less of an impact than reading about it in the news—winning a track meet might make a high school athlete feel good, but getting her picture in the paper with the other winners was truly something special (Briggs, 2013). A social media post, however, has the charm of instant gratification, offering a kind of immediacy and response that is simply not available from a print newspaper and which can be broadcast by a participant or eyewitness.

Accessing the news has also undergone radical changes due to the influence of social media. A social media user can, for example, use a key term tagged with a hashtag (#) to find posts on Twitter about a news item. The most popular news items are said to be "trending." Social media platforms, such as Facebook, also provide a marketplace to draw potential news customers in (Bullard, 2015). One of the most effective marketing gimmicks is the "listicle"–—that is, a short, quirky list of informational items intended to arrest and capture the interest of a social media user and drawn him or her to a commercial site.

Social media makes it possible for users to follow specific news sources that use a perspective that they find agreeable. Sociologists are finding that social media users get much of their political news through sites such as Facebook (Bode, 2016). Further, instead of having to buy a newspaper that tries to cover all of the topics that people are likely to be interested in, with sections devoted to sports, business, local news, national news, world news, and so on, social media users can choose to follow only those social media news sites that fit within their areas of interest. A person who only cares about sports news can follow dozens of sports news outlets using Twitter, Facebook, and similar sites, while a person interested in science and technology news can find numerous sites that serve up all the latest discoveries. Only a few decades ago, futurists foresaw a time when people would be able to have personalized newspapers, full of stories about the topics they most cared about, delivered to them each day. For the most part, social media news reporting has made this prediction a reality, even though there is an argument to be made that reading only news about narrow topical areas does not make for a well-informed citizenry (Hayes, Battles & Hilton-Morrow, 2013).

Further Insights

News reporting before the days of social media was a specialized field requiring many different skills. Reporters had to be skilled researchers and writers to be able to look into the background of their subjects and discover relevant information and then write about it in ways that make dry or confusing material interesting and accessible to the public. Journalists also had to have a talent for talking to people from all walks of life and, perhaps more important, getting those people to talk to them. Finally, the profession required quick wits and an ability to react to changing circumstances, making intuitive leaps about the real significance of seemingly innocuous facts.

The modern state of news reporting is far, far different. The widespread availability of cheap, small cameras capable of recording high quality photos, audio, and videos have put into the hands of almost everyone tools that were once accessible only to small numbers of people and only usable with considerable preparation (Shaw, 2012). This disruptive innovation has led to the rise of the amateur reporter, often a person who just happens to be in the right place at the right time, with a fully charged cell phone battery and a clear view of events. Eyewitness accounts and visuals of major events, such as riots, uprisings, and natural disasters, are frequently crowdsourced in real time or shortly after from people on the ground rather than gathered by a reporter who arrives later.

To understand the magnitude of the change that has occurred, one need only recall the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. That tragic event was captured on a handheld movie camera by Abraham Zapruder, and Zapruder’s footage has been endlessly replayed and dissected ever since. When tragedy strikes in the modern world, however, those looking for information about the events can rest assured that they were most likely recorded on not one or two cameras that happened to be nearby, but dozens. Having access to more information about current events in the form of pictures and videos taken by those nearby, however, very rarely provides the public with any kind of heightened understanding of those events. It is quite literally a case of greater access to information resulting in less comprehension (Wenger & Potter, 2012; Browne, Stack & Ziyadah, 2015).

Viewpoints

Though some argue that the availability of the Internet and social media have made news reporting much less important an activity than it used to be, the opposite may be true. That is, the fact that society is now awash in information of every sort from events all over the world, practically within seconds of their occurring, means that there is a greater need for talented journalists to sort through this sea of information and filter out the redundancies and irrelevancies in order to present the public with a coherent picture of events. Journalism schools seem to be well aware of the new realities. After several years in which journalism cast a gimlet eye upon social media, viewing it as unreliable at best and an inane distraction at worst, journalism faculty are now beginning to incorporate the use of social media into their curriculum.

These classes do not focus on specific technologies such as Twitter, since the particulars of technology change rather frequently and are often not directly relevant to the study or practice of journalism. Instead, the focus is on the principles of journalism and how they can be applied to new methodologies of news gathering made possible by increased access to information (Reimold, 2013).

A significant area of focus has become the importance of exercising ethics when making use of social media to gather news and report it. Social media works because people are anxious to interact with one another and to share information about themselves, but it frequently happens that people only want to share certain information with certain people. In many cases, reporters can easily use social media to gain access to information that could be very damaging to any number of people. Some reporters take the approach that if people put information about themselves online—even if they don’t fully understand what it means to do so, or how many people will be able to access it—then they have assumed the risk of making that information public, and deserve whatever repercussions occur.

Other journalists, perhaps more familiar with the frailty of human nature and less interested in making headlines at any cost, understand the importance of considering the circumstances before using information as part of their story. Journalism students are being confronted with such dilemmas with increasing frequency, thanks to social media. Part of the reason for this has been attributed to the relative informality that reigns in social media communications (Streitmatter, 2015).

Social media posts and messages, not unlike email, tend to use a style and tone that is more conversational, even chatty, than the typical newspaper article or television news script. Younger reporters, accustomed to communicating with peers using social media, sometimes find it difficult to maintain a professional bearing when using social media for work related communications. Social media also offers unique opportunities for information gathering, and these open whole new ethical dilemmas for journalists to consider (Anderson, 2013). For example, it is common knowledge that when dealing with Internet communications, all is not necessarily as it seems. It is fairly easy for one person to impersonate someone else, for example, especially when the communication is happening between user accounts belonging to people who have never met face to face. This means that for a reporter investigating a person suspected of wrongdoing, it would be all too easy to create a fictitious social media account posing as another person entirely, and use this account to approach the subject of the investigation, in the hope of enticing the person to reveal information that the subject would almost certainly never reveal to one who was known as a journalist.

Like many of the thorniest ethical dilemmas, this scenario is one which could be perpetrated and never discovered, making it all the more important for journalists to consider well in advance, so they can decide for themselves, after careful reflection, what kind of journalists they want to be. It is almost certain that the technology and the profession of news reporting will continue to evolve in ways as drastic as have been seen during the rise of social media, and it is just as certain that journalists will continue to face new dilemmas they will need to carefully weigh (Shepard, 2013).

Terms & Concepts

Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is a model of financing or project development that draws on contributions of some resource (e.g., money or information) from large numbers of people. News reporting has begun to take advantage of crowdsourcing as well, with footage and photographs for many stories being contributed by amateurs armed with cell phone cameras.

Disruptive Innovation: Disruptive innovation is a phenomenon discussed in the fields of business and the social sciences. It refers to a new technology that arrives on the scene and provides new methods of performing tasks. While the technology is usually helpful and therefore a welcome change, it also disrupts established ways of doing things, traditional hierarchies within organizations, and can even change the way people relate to one another.

Hashtag: A hashtag is the symbol #. It is used on the social networking site Twitter to mark a keyword that many people are tweeting about, so that other users can search for the hashtag and quickly find all the tweets that mention it. For example, if a member of Britain’s royal family were getting married, news reporters tweeting from the ceremony might use the hashtag, #RoyalWedding. That way, any Twitter user could search for that hashtag and find all the tweets that use it.

Listicle: This term is meant to be a contraction of the words "list" and "article," and it describes the many Internet news postings that are little more than lists of bullet points. These listicles have titles such as "Five Things You Need to Know About Planting a Garden," or "The Twelve Best Restaurants in Alaska." In a style indicative of much Internet news reporting, a small amount of effort is expended to create the article, in the hope that Internet users will glance at it and then share it with their friends online. Some have pointed to the growing prevalence of listicles as signs of the declining quality of journalism.

Platform Specialization: Platform specialization refers to the way that users of social media tend to use different social networking communities for different purposes when it comes to finding and evaluating news. Twitter is the service of choice for people who think of themselves as extremely interested in the news, and it is the site most often mentioned when people are asked how they found out about a particular news topic, such as a political scandal or a natural disaster. Facebook, on the other hand, is the social network that most people say they use to share news stories with their friends. In most cases, platform specialization is a property that emerges without having been intentionally designed; people use the social networking tool that happens to work best for their needs, not the one that has been most painstakingly designed for a particular purpose.

Social Networking: Social networking refers to the use of various technology platforms on the Internet to create and use online communities of friends and shared interests. After the Internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, social networking sites quickly sprang up to offer users the means to easily interact with each other, without having to know arcane commands to connect. Social networks now account for a large amount of all Internet traffic, and for many people they are the primary means used to find out about news and events in their home towns and all around the world.

Bibliography

Anderson, C. W. (2013). Rebuilding the news: Metropolitan journalism in the digital age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Bode, L. (2016). Political news in the news feed: Learning politics from social media. Mass Communication & Society, 19(1), 24–48. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=112042616&site=ehost-live

Briggs, M. (2013). Journalism next: A practical guide to digital reporting and publishing. Los Angeles, CA: Sage/CQ Press.

Browne, M., Stack, L., & Ziyadah, M. (2015). Streets to screens: Conflict, social media and the news. Information, Communication & Society, 18(11), 1339–1347. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=109539519&site=ehost-live

Bullard, S. B. (2015). Editors use social media mostly to post story links. Newspaper Research Journal, 36(2), 170–183. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=108423134&site=ehost-live

Hayes, J. E., Battles, K., & Hilton-Morrow, W. (2013). War of the worlds to social media: Mediated communication in times of crisis. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Reimold, D. (2013). Journalism of ideas: Brainstorming, developing, and selling stories in the digital age. New York, NY: Routledge.

Shaw, I. S. (2012). Human rights journalism: Advances in reporting distant humanitarian interventions. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Shepard, S. B. (2013). Deadlines and disruption: My turbulent path from print to digital. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Streitmatter, R. (2015). A force for good: How the American news media have propelled positive change. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

Streitmatter, R. (2012). Mightier than the sword: How the news media have shaped American history. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Wenger, D. H., & Potter, D. (2012). Advancing the story: Broadcast journalism in a multimedia world. Washington, DC: CQ Press/Sage.

Zion, L., & Craig, D. (2015). Ethics for digital journalists: Emerging best practices. London, UK: Routledge.

Suggested Reading

Campbell, R., Martin, C. R., & Fabos, B. (2014). Media & culture: Mass communication in a digital age. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Mosca, L., & Quaranta, M. (2016). News diets, social media use and non-institutional participation in three communication ecologies: Comparing Germany, Italy and the UK. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 325–345. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=112191494&site=ehost-live

Reich, Z. (2013). The impact of technology on news reporting: A longitudinal perspective. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 90(3), 417–434.

Van Leuven, S., Heinrich, A., & Deprez, A. (2015). Foreign reporting and sourcing practices in the network sphere: A quantitative content analysis of the Arab Spring in Belgian news media. New Media & Society, 17(4), 573–591. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database SocINDEX Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=101601449&site=ehost-live

Zhuang, Z. (2014). The importance of citizen journalists in new media when reporting on catastrophes. Global Studies Journal, 7(3), 21–39.