Journalists: (Ex) Gatekeepers of Information

There isn’t a way to consume media without it affecting your daily life. Media is created to persuade you or inform you of something. Now that we have social media, we are experiencing this almost 24/7. We are attached to our phones and are being force-fed information. Because a lot of this comes from personal social media accounts, the spread of misinformation is continuously growing. Us journalists need to adapt in order to keep up the spread of information and news. We cannot stick to our old ways, we have to take to social media to attempt to balance out the spread of misinformation with real journalism.

In “Mobile and Social Journalism: A Practical Guide for Multimedia Journalism,” Anthony Adornato says, “We must have ongoing conversations with our subscribers. That's one reason why our work on social pays off--we provide them with quality content and engagement”(Adornato 53). It’s important to remember that we are not simply copying and pasting an article from a newspaper onto a social platform. Engagement with the audience changes completely when you switch from print to social media. We cannot forget that the thing that makes social media so interesting is the social aspect of it. We don’t just like to be informed, we like to share our thoughts, we want people to know that we are informed. Social media feeds into this and journalists need to learn to use this to their advantage. Our audience is what keeps us moving forward and our media is what keeps their lives moving forward. We have formed a relationship with our audience that is unique to anything we’ve ever seen before. We have so many more opportunities to keep our audience hooked and coming back for more. As long as we play our cards right, our presence can become so much more significant.

With social media, we have to create a balance between being professional while also keeping our audience hooked. No one wants to read a boring article, so we have to make sure we talk in a way that keeps audiences interested and coming back for more. Personally, I think this will be the most interesting way journalists will have to adapt. Before social media, everyone read the newspaper to get the news, whether it was interesting or not. Journalists only had to compete with other journalists. Now we’re competing with other journalists, social media algorithms, and other social media users. Journalism will still change in our lifetimes, so we have to stay up to date on what the newest form of media is.