Challenging the traditional notion of journalism in the age of social media

From the very first newspaper to today, journalists have been in a constant state of adaptation through technological advancements. Today, in our social media fueled society, journalists are no longer the sole distributors of news. Nearly anyone at any time can create and publish content.

The book “Mobile and Social Media Journalism” by Anthony Adornato, writes how our audience has shifted from a passive to an active one. An active audience is in the driver's seat. They are the gatekeepers of information. They now can determine what stories are deemed “newsworthy.”

This shift has turned journalism from a one-way to a two-way conversation. Our audience is now able to communicate to journalists what they want to see and are even able to produce content themselves.

We must now foster a journalist-audience relationship to build trust with our audience.

What does this mean for the future of journalists? We must adapt.

By adapt, I mean use social media to foster a personal relationship with our audience. We no longer, and will never again, be the sole distributors and information holders of current events.

Social media cannot be ignored and we must use it. As Adornato wrote, it can be used to reach an increasing number of people who no longer watch television news. According to a 2020 study from the Pew Research Center, 86% of adults get news from a mobile device.

So how can we reconstruct journalism to stray away from the traditional notion of journalism to meet our audiences’ needs? A New York Times article about 10 themes for news shared how audiences crave transparency and nourishing social spaces.

The key to building trust and combating “fake news” is through transparency and this means using social media to post what is happening in real-time. Audiences want to know why you are telling a story, who is telling it, and the process of putting it together.

Here is my tweet about the article

Additionally, our audience wants to be a part of the conversation through connection. The authors of the NYT article wrote, “what makes a platform social is not that it allows people to broadcast their opinions to the world, it’s that it enables intimate conversations among people they trust,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Although throughout this blog I have mentioned reconstructing and challenging the traditional notion of journalism, I don’t think we should completely throw away our traditional journalistic values.

Yes, our active audience has the power of user-generated content to share to social media platforms and this two-way conversational relationship allows journalists to produce content that caters to our audience’s demands. But, as Adornato wrote, not all user-generated content is news.

We still have a duty to fact-check, determine newsworthiness, find our own reliable sources and find our own story ideas.

So I ask, should news outlets make mobile and social media a top priority for news gathering and delivery? What do you think is the future of journalism?

I believe we must use our traditional notions of journalism and simply reconstruct it to the digital age to increase audience engagement and trust.

Let’s let our audience be a part of the conversation while sticking to our ethical values as journalists.