Social Media: The People Formerly Known as Audie...
Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organization. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.
Journalists are becoming more inclined to see blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media as a valuable adjunct to traditional media, and sometimes a corrective to them.
A new role for journalists
Verifying material to ensure it is suitable for broadcasting can be an elaborate process. Checking snippets of information posted on Twitter is more difficult.
Either way, there is clearly a role for people—including journalists, but not limited to them—to select, filter and analyse the torrent of information being posted on the internet. All this raises the question whether some stories may be better covered by constantly updated streams of tweets than by traditional articles. By providing more raw material than ever from which to distil the news, in short, social media have both done away with editors and shown up the need for them. News organisations are already abandoning attempts to be first to break news, focusing instead on being the best at verifying and curating it. But like other aspects of journalism, this role is now open to anyone.
As well as getting involved (if they choose) in newsgathering, verification and transmission of news, readers and viewers have also become part of the news-distribution system as they share and recommend items of interest via e-mail and social networks. If searching for news was the most important development of the past two decades, sharing news may be among the most important of the future. Typically around 20-30% of visitors to the websites of big news organisations come from Google’s search engine or its news site, Google News.
The proportion of visitors referred from Facebook is smaller, but growing quickly as social-sharing features become more commonplace and easier to use. With a single click of a Facebook “Like” button, for example, you can recommend a story, video or slideshow to your entire network of friends.
Letting your network of friends guide you to stuff you might find interesting makes a lot of sense. Friends are a good proxy for one’s tastes, and social recommendation is far more efficient than maintaining lists of keywords relating to topics of interest. At the same time, social recommendations are “recreating the watercooler” by increasing the odds that, in a fragmented media landscape, friends and family members will have seen the same things.
Flipboard, an app that runs on the iPad, goes a stage further. It can compile an entire personalised magazine, with flippable pages, in which the articles are items recommended by the user’s contacts on Facebook and Twitter. Such services are needed because the explosion of content online in the past decade means you spend a lot of time filtering, and you don’t spend much time reading.(https://www.daowen.com)
The feeling is mutual
Clearly the readers and viewers are getting steadily more involved in gathering, filtering and distributing news. This process is called the “mutualisation” of news. Involving thousands of readers through “crowdsourcing” also lets news outlets do things that would otherwise be impractical, such as searching through troves of documents looking for interesting material.
Rather than thinking of themselves as setting the agenda and managing the conversation, news organisations need to recognise that journalism is now just part of a conversation that is going on anyway. The role of journalists in this new world is to add value to the conversation by providing reporting, context, analysis, verification and debunking, and by making available tools and platforms that allow people to participate. All this requires journalists to admit that they do not have a monopoly on wisdom.
Words & Expressions
adjunct：附件，助手
watercooler：饮水机
torrent：急流，洪流
crowdsourcing：众包，众等
debunk：揭露真相
[1] GROSSMAN L. You—Yes, you are Time’s Person of the Year[EB/OL].(2006-12-25)[2022-01-15].https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html.
[2] The end of mass media：Coming full circle[EB/OL].(2011-07-09)[2022-01-20].https://www.economist.com/special-report/2011/07/09/coming-full-circle.
[3] Social media: The people formerly known as the audience[EB/OL].(2011-07-09)[2022-01-15].https://www.economist.com/special-report/2011/07/09/the-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience.