Down with New Media for News!
​
New media is affecting News at a rate that nothing is believable with a lot of conflicting content. Fake news used to apply to journalistic content that was mixed with humour and is now considered fake based on the accuracy of information. “Now, the term more commonly refers to false or misleading information made to look like a fact-based news story...” (Nelson and Taneja, 2018)
​
"However, the content produced by users also impacts the traditional model of news communication." (Han, 2020). Han goes on to argue that these users are what traditional news is today and the need to formulate a "news content production model" (Han, 2020) in order to keep up with the ever-changing new media.
​
Does it mean that new media will compromise what news is today in terms of content? News content started as a written sheet passed around in Rome stating facts that evolved to what we have today. Traditional news was always fact-checked with reliable sources and concrete information. Now, because anyone with a media platform is considered a civilian journalist, the content that is produced isn't always accurate. With Facebook, as a new media, being the most popular social network according to statista.com it also wants to become a source of news. It's already used as a medium for news content from its various online user, "...continued spread of damaging rumours, half-truths and hate speech across the world." (Newman, 2019)
​
“The resulting news production chain, characterized by little or no journalistic and editorial curation of the information, had consequences for the quality of the news that reached news audiences, in terms of how accurate or misleading that information was." (Schrøder, 2013)
​
Is news outlets pro-fake-news to combat excessive amounts of content as a result of new media? Were they embellishing details to say they had the right story first or using misleading content just to stay current? An example would be the recent protest in Minneapolis in response to the death of George Floyd, and the story behind who left the slabs of bricks around during what was considered peaceful. The news made public first by civilian journalists through their social media accounts accused the government and police. News stations later picked up the story which led to the many theories shared online through speculation and misinformation, but couldn't find out where the bricks came from. Because so much content was coming through, traditional media couldn't keep up making the information unreliable. Too many theories were going around affecting the news itself, who was right, and who was wrong.
​
In a study done by Pew Research Centre, "About four-in-ten Americans (43%) get news on Facebook." (Shearer and Masta, 2018) and they are not concerned about the accuracy of the content they review. Using new media for news is pointless if no one cares for the content itself much less the accuracy. It creates a surplus of content online where it's most convenient and distracts from credible information.
​
References:
Han, Weiwei. “Research on the Production Mode and Communication Model of News Content in the New Media Electronic Era.” Journal of Physics: Conference Series, vol. 1574, 2020, p. 012025., doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1574/1/012025.
Schrøder, Kim Christian. “News Media Old and New.” Journalism Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 60–78, doi:10.1080/1461670X.2014.890332.
Nelson, Jacob L., and Harsh Taneja. “The Small, Disloyal Fake News Audience: The Role of Audience Availability in Fake News Consumption.” New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 10, Oct. 2018, pp. 3720–3737, doi:10.1177/1461444818758715.
Elisa Shearer and Katerina Eva Matsa. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2018.” Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, 30 May 2020, www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/.
Newman, Nic. “Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions 2019.” Digital News Report, 10 Jan. 2019, www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2019/journalism-media-technology-trends- predictions-2019/.
Non-Academic
Clement, J. “Most Used Social Media Platform.” Statista, 24 Apr. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/.