Journalism & Social Media

As journalism progresses around the world through the forms of technology, so does the way we receive the information that is put out there. We get information from many different sources and platforms besides the basics of newspapers, websites, or even magazines.

Social media is one of the biggest platforms that almost everyone uses on a daily bases to get statistics and knowledge. Journalism is the act of writing professional news on different platforms. Journalists even use social media to find information to put into their articles that they write.

Journalism and Social Media

As social media evolves, it gets both negative and positive feedback. Facebook, Twitter, TMZ, Instagram, Snapchat, and now even TikTok provides information to journalists so they can write a good interesting story. Just because journalists use information from these different social media platforms, does not mean all information that was put into the article is credible information.

There are many great ways that journalism is affected by social media as there are problems. Some of the main problems that I found was stuff that cannot be easily changed like the fake news that journalists can intercept and want to use. Also, if you think about it, everyone relies on social media to get a good story and find information on people or other types of news. Social media does not just help everyone be known in a good way because it can get people in trouble like civilians or cops. This also leads to the next point of how certain social media groups focus on one group over another.

How Social Media Changed Journalism

Again, the biggest problem with social media is that people look for information and they follow dead end leads. The fake news that people receive could put others lives in danger or make something out of nothing. There has been plenty of times where information does not add up to the hard facts that are later announced. This is also gets back to the point of relying on social media to. We wake up and the first thing we do is check our social medias’ for updates on situations. We sometimes call this our daily news check in or even our verification stage and see stuff that we later see on the news. Our first step is to make sure that its true by going to social media and everyone has an opinion and some people might even have facts.

All journalists are somewhat required to use social media because it assists with getting the public’s opinion on situations. This will make the public feel included on decisions or make them feel as if they are helping with something important. Journalism and social media could be very strong force or be a downfall for both parts, it mostly depend on how it is used by civilians, journalists, or even news companies.