The Impact Social Media Has on Journalism

Anthony Adornato’s “Mobile and Social Media Journalism, A Practical Guide for Multimedia Journalism” offers a thought-provoking perspective on how social media is impacting journalism and how this impact is changing how journalists execute their reporting.

In an age where anyone can create and publish content, there are positive and negative consequences to the opportunities that mass communication gives us. While social media allows us to amplify our voices and connect on a global scale, it also allows for misinformation to spread like wildfire which we have not yet been able to put out.

An active audience is an audience that engages with your content by liking, commenting, and offering their own expertise and information. An active audience is one that builds a sense of community with the level of active engagement that is exchanged between the journalist and the readers. According to the NYT Post article, news consumers have changed their habits by determining what time of day they would be consuming their news and how the nature of that content varies from morning to night.

The relationship between the journalist and the audience today is vastly different than what it was before the age of social media. Now the readers can directly talk with the journalist and respond in real time to the content the journalist is publishing online, instead of a top-down flow of information. The audience is also able to provide the journalist with ideas and information because of the open dialogue that social media provides.

A skill that journalists need to navigate the mobile and social media world is media literacy. The ability to understand how social media interactions work and what brings people to view your content is important to become literate in the social media language. A journalist’s ability to adjust and evolve along with journalism itself, allows for the journalist to reach their full potential in their ability to report to their audience.

An example of news gathering that the book gives is scrolling through social media to find what is happening in a specific area. I’ve done this before to find out what was happening in Ithaca, in my hometown, and around the world. An example of news distribution is the many different formats that news can be shared on social media. The twitter thread allows for a journalist to make multiple updates on one story, whereas a photo or video could be shared on an Instagram story. A personal example of audience engagement that I have is when I used social media to share a survey, I was conducting for my documentary studies course, allowing me to interact with an audience in a way that journalists had never before.