The rise in popularity of social media has changed the journalism industry on a multitude of levels. While journalists have had to learn a new set of skills to incorporate the new platforms into their work, the general public have been learning to use the same social media platform. Along with this, the transition to social media has changed the way journalists and their audience interact with each other.
Some major effects of the rise in social media include increases in:
Citizen journalism
Transparency around the production and producers of journalism
Interaction between audiences and journalists
Citizen Journalism
Prior to the popularization of social media and the internet, news media like newspapers, radio and broadcast were mainly only available to professional journalists. People who disseminated news were journalists and people who consumed news were their audience. Since the early days of journalism, however, reporting and disseminating news has become increasingly accessible to the general public and quickly increased in accessibility when internet and especially social media became widely available. With cell phones and social media comes the ability for anyone to share information, photos and videos with nearly any other person within minutes or even seconds, creating an unlimited potential for citizen journalism.
Twitter has been one of the greatest opportunities for citizen journalism, likely because of the ease in which a tweet can reach people who are not directly connected to the original tweeter. Through hashtags, retweets and trending topics, tweets can travel across the screens of up to 396.5 million people — the number of Twitter accounts in 2022.
Transparency
Social media has also changed the way that journalists produce and promote their work. Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram allow journalists to communicate to audiences more regularly and in an informal setting. Journalists may use social media to update their followers about their personal lives, share their professional interests and promote their work.
One way that journalists have been doing this is by sharing behind-the-scenes updates on their projects. Journalists may post photos or videos of themselves in the field, the location they are reporting from, the equipment they use or even just them having fun with coworkers. Posts like these help audiences better understand how content is produced and who is producing it. This can help improve trust among news consumers by building a more personal connection between the journalists and the audience.
Consumers and Producers
The conversation between journalists and the people consuming their content used to be a one-way conversation for the most part. The television screen, the newspaper and the radio all acted as a barrier between those producing the content and those consuming it. This has greatly changed in the transition to social media; not only are journalists able to communicate more with their audience, but their audience is finally able to respond.
This has resulted in what we can call an active audience. News consumers are now able to better communicate what is important to them and share what they know about a potential story. Journalists can tap into this active audience by keeping up with trending topics, answering questions posed on social media and crowdsourcing stories and interviews.