It’s hard to imagine how news was disseminated before the internet. News agencies and aggregators make the furthest corners of the world instantaneously accessible to those with the technology to log on, and that number continues to grow. My routine is thus: Google news is my homepage and I scroll through, coffee steaming by my side, reading articles, making mental notes and collating a grey-scale, catch-all assessment of the most important stories of the day.
Twitter is my next port of call, offering the opportunity to discover developments from only moments before through text, images and video. Embedded journalists tweet as they go about their news-gathering business, embattled civilians tweet as chaos unfolds around them.
You can find advocacy or criticism and you can find it quickly, but without the solid foundations laid by reading further into a situation it can certainly appear messy and confusing. Perhaps it is this dichotomy of sources that makes media objectivity so important.
Many have asked if, in the age of social media and ‘citizen journalism’, there is a place for traditional journalism? Can the best possible story be told without either one of these two sources? In my eyes, social media and media are not competing, but complementary.
Covering news in China or North Korea, for example, it would be difficult to escape the internet restrictions and create an unbiased and accurate picture of what is really happening using social media exclusively. News organisations and wire services have some access and sources which simply cannot be matched by citizen journalism.
Both face some of the same challenges in the future: Can writers, film makers and photographers continue to overcome a news agenda which is increasingly moving towards entertainment and trivia? Can legitimate and progressive discourse be created on twitter amid a barrage of self promotion, misinformation and celebrity culture? Despite limiting its users to 140 characters, twitter users still manage to produce an off-putting amount of spam.
Social media and mass media, in order to convey important information and messages, must overcome the financially beneficial urge to attract sales/hits by reducing the focus and quality of their output. Media en masse remains merely a distraction for some, but its power and potential to influence remain if it refrains from trying to compete with social media and plays to its own strengths.
For the inquisitive it is bliss: We can have our cake and eat it.
Target Aquired | Mission Aborted 