How the journalism industry has adapted to social media.

A lot of people have said that its possible the journalism industry is dying, but I can say for a fact that if you have social media, that you have actually helped the journalism industry in staying alive.

Distributed journalism or digital journalism refers to news stories being online through the internet rather then print or on T.V. (so basically exactly what it sounds like)

Distributed journalism allows for articles to be all over our news feeds, on Facebook, Instagram and snapchat. Articles will come up on our news feeds because of what we look at on the internet, and we will almost always click on them. Because weather it’s true or not, we want (well I do at least) to believe the Kourtney and Scott will get back together (in case you don’t know I am referring to Kourtney Kardashian and Scott Disick) and that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are really together (even though you still secretly still ship Brangelina). Half of the time these articles will say the exact same thing as last time, like “a close source to the family says that Kourtney is ready to give him a second chance”.

 

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Only then to a week later seeing Kourtney Kardashian post a photo on her Instagram with her new BAE, confirming that of course that article isn’t true.

But sadly deep down I know when another article comes up that says ‘Scott and Kourtney finally getting back together’  that I will click on it, and check her Instagram to see if she has deleted or added any photos to confirm this.

Distributed journalism is now a tool that makes us stick to media. I mean I have to give  props to the journalism industry, they may be loosing the industry in the traditional sense but they have adapted and changed to what media is, so that their industry doesn’t die. Distributed journalism means that the what they put in the articles is still monitored and ‘pre packaged’ like it would be if it goes on T.V, but as users we like that because it causes drama and interest, and when a celebrity finally confirms the reports (or deny’s it) we get all excited in knowing that reading all of those 15 articles about Kylie (Jenner) being pregnant wasn’t a complete waste of time.

As much as I don’t want to be that person that clicks on all of those articles that pop up on my news feed, I know that I always will (and for what reason I honestly don’t know) but I think it is fair to say that journalism isn’t dying, it is just changing to adapt to the current emergent media, by finding out what our readers like most and publishing stories about that, weather they are true or not.

Now I’m off to continue reading weather or not Khloe and Tristan are still together…

References

A model for the 21st century newsroom pt2: Distributed Journalism

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/danielle-sabrina/traditional-journalism-is_b_13367872.html

4 thoughts on “How the journalism industry has adapted to social media.

  1. I think it’s interesting that you pointed out that although the nature of the journalism industry has changed, they have adapted their ‘pre-packaged’ content to suit a distributed network. In fact, with the algorithms that are widely used by Google, Facebook and the like, it is very easy to target specific content towards a user based on their previous browsing behaviour and predictions of what they want to see. So, although distributed journalism is very progressive for citizen journalists and getting stories out that previously would have been silenced, do you think it has the same bias-issues as legacy media? Here’s an article which expresses the issue in regard to Facebook’s system of targeting ads, it can be useful to consider, because news content is targeted to users in the same way: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/were-uncanny-valley-targeted-advertising

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  2. Hey Shay! I think it’s interesting that you decided to show that journalism isn’t dying, I think you argued it well and stated a lot of very true statements. The memes you incorporated helped tell your story and were enjoyable. All round I found this a great blog post, only suggestion would be to maybe try an reduce the word count 🙂 Thanks!

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  3. Hey Shay! Awesome post backed up with actual definitions and sources. Your points about journalism reaching our social media is really on point and the way in which it does so to keep us coming back for more is particularly true. Check out this article: https://socialmediasydney.net.au/social-media-now-a-main-source-of-news/ – it goes into depth as to why Social Media is now our main source of news and how it will most likely continue to be well into the future.

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