Facebook and Twitter: The Death of the Journalism Business?

Social media. We all use it for different purposes. It’s used to connect with people across the globe in an instant, share thoughts, events and multimedia, or post the avocado toast you had for breakfast this morning. However, with the growth and adaption of social media, we’ve found it to be useful for a lot more things. On Facebook, you can now apply for jobs, sell your items and even watch the news. Yep, don’t worry about grabbing the paper, tuning into the radio or switching on the telly. Have a scroll on Twitter, catch up with your friends while simultaneously catching up on the latest news. This is great for time poor people, or people not really interested in directly consuming news through traditional sources, but what does it mean for journalists and media companies? Are Facebook and Twitter ruining the reputation of journalism? Should we expect newspapers to be completely wiped out in the next coming decades? If anyone and everyone can post, what should we believe as true information? This week I presented, and I spoke about the increasing popularity of social media, how we’ve changed the way we consumed news,  and what that means for the journalism business. 

A 2018 census found that 79% of Australians are using social media. That includes almost everyone aged 18-29, which wasn’t surprising to me. What was surprising, was that almost half of those aged 65+ uses social media. 

sensis.com.au

This had me thinking, what does the future of print newspapers look like? Keeping in mind that the 66% of 50-64 year old’s are using social media, and in 30 years they will be 80+, I think we can expect to see a drastic decline in newspapers within 30 years. I think, at least in highly populated, advanced  cities such as Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, print newspapers will be accessible, but hardly. Perhaps in rural areas they will be more accessible due to phone service and other contributing factors. 

Social media has made it hard to believe what’s real and what’s fake. On Twitter, news is easily spread around with a simple hashtag. This makes it possible for anyone with an account to search a hashtag and have all text with that hashtag included, readily available. This has potential to be seriously destructive for the reputation of journalism. If anyone can make an account, call themselves a journalist, and post articles they’ve written, how do we know it’s true? How do we know what to believe on the Internet?

A study by data scientist, Soroush Vosoughi, found that fake news spread faster on Twitter than real news. Vosoughi and his team collected 12 years’ worth of data combined with fact-checking organisations and advanced bot detection technology. The results concluded that the true stories would rarely reach 1,000 people, whereas the fake stories would reach well over 10,000. This confirms that humans are responsible for the spread of fake news on Twitter.

Soroush Vosoughi and his team
news.mit.edu


Something I didn’t talk about in my presentation was click bait, which draws back to the spread and virality of fake news. We’ve been told that the introduction should grab the reader right away, and the same is true for headlines. 

Peter Preston, former editor of the Guardian and a columnist for the Observer said clickbait stories have “somewhat diminished the value of news”.

Online news companies and magazines collect data from the amount of ‘clicks’ their articles get, and get paid per click. So on social media, more often than not we are seeing outrageous or suggestive headlines, people seeing the headline and sharing the story without actually reading the article. The article would tell them that the headline is false, but because they haven’t read it, they are taking the headline as true information. This is one way that fake news spreads quickly amongst social media, threatening the reputation of journalism.

Social media has allowed communication to progress in many ways, but is the journalism industry under threat? I believe that for the moment, we should take it as another way to share news, stories and talents. What does the future hold for journalism? I don’t know exactly, but I’m sure the industry will advance and adapt, and ways will be created to overcome the struggles social media puts on the journalism business.  


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