Today we're excited to launch a new series, in partnership with the Columbia Journalism Review, "Disrupting Journalism: How Platforms Have Upended the News".
@karanicolas Wait... Journalism funding started drying up so journalists started posting stories on social media to increase their reach and now somehow the dry funds are social media's fault?
If anything, social media is responsible for the journalism industry continuing to hang on to dear life.
Blame your owners and managers for squandering money on things other than good journalism.
@LouisIngenthron I think what that analysis misses is the nexus between journalism's declining revenues and the growth of social media, especially in terms of their dominance of the online ad market.
Also, throwing blame around doesn't really help resolve the core problem, which is that the decline in journalism threatens the sustainability of democracy.
@karanicolas I'd argue that it correlates more closely to the growth and popularization of the internet than social media specifically.
In my mind, journalism has declined because of two key factors:
1) It no longer has a monopoly on information. Whereas the newspaper or evening news used to be a central point of shared cultural information sourcing, the democratization of information that the internet provides created a degree of competition that the industry simply couldn't keep up with.
2) The journalism industry's response to (1) has largely accelerated this process by trying to mimic the clickbait they were now competing against instead of defining themselves by filling a niche the internet hordes couldn't produce. See, for example, the move to 24 hour news cycles, reporting on tweets from public officials that people can follow directly themselves, massive increases in cheap crime reporting, and reliance on interns writing ragebait headlines for social media instead of investing in longer-term investigative journalism.
Real journalism is absolutely essential to the sustainability of democracy.
Unfortunately, it seems the folks most in need of that lesson are the ones who own and operate for-profit journalistic endeavors.
