Social Media has without a doubt revolutionized interactive communication and the journalistic approach to news. We all get our news from various resources with fewer of us looking to more traditional media for ours news consumption. In some extent or another all journalism will feature, if not already, a social component. The Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Internet and American Life Project collaborated to create a survey that explored the new participatory culture for news to gain a greater understanding of trends in media. For one content is changing to become more personal and therefore more social. Another aspect t that has caused a change in news in the increase in timely information. We are able to check at any given moment what the headlining news is. Therefore, people are turning to different platforms to get their news.
It’s interesting to note that the regular readers of The New York Times are 34% younger than 30, compared with 23% of the public, which suggest that a new generation of readers is discovering the virtues of the newspaper. Yet many still turn to the Internet to get their news putting a strain on how journalists in the past have conducted their work. Their entire industry is changing due to the rise of social media and the Internet.
While there are many options for the news consumer there aren’t many choices for a journalist. They either adapt of risk losing a job. We are seeing a rise of citizen journalists and bloggers are being seen as credible sources for news. How can a journalist make a living when their entire training has since then been changed? It’s time to start thinking about how journalism has changed due to social media. It’s a topic worth exploring. After all the journalist set the agenda for the news you consume.
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This has been a personal topic for me because we relied on print for our media monitoring service. We added social media and tv to our service over 5 years ago and that alone was not enough to maintain our profit margins. New media is the new mainstream.