Social Media Takes the World By Storm: How Journalists are Adapting to this Digital Lifestyle

“Me in the dressing room getting ready for the play Bye Bye Birdie!”

This was verbatim the caption I wrote to accompany my very first Instagram post. The photo of me posing in a blue poodle skirt has long since been deleted, but its impact has stayed with me for the long haul. This post was my introduction to the vast world of social media.

When my mom and I spoke over the phone the other day, I asked how old she was when she made her first social media account. She didn’t remember her exact age, but she recalled being in her early-thirties when she first activated an account on classmates.com: A social media website that enables a user to keep in contact with other users who graduated from the same high school.

My first Instagram post dates back to 2012: I had just turned 10.

I can’t help but reflect on how fast social media has become a huge part of our everyday lives. Datareportal’s Digital 2022 July Global Statshot Report notes that 4.70 billion people (59% of the global population) are active social media users. That’s a 5.1% increase, which may not seem high, but that’s an additional 227 million users on social media.

A snapshot of our global digital growth. | Source: Datareportal

One of the statistics I found most interesting is that the average daily time spent using social media is 2 hours and 29 minutes.

What do people do on social media for nearly two-and-a-half hours a day? Well, Datareportal has an answer for this as well.

Popular social media activities include keeping in contact with family and friends, following influencers and celebrities, purchasing popular products, filling in some spare time, and keeping up with the latest news.

Along with the increase in social media usage came a new way to consume news, which fostered a dramatic change in the journalism world. Now, anyone can be a journalist.

Personally, my favorite change to the journalism world is the introduction of the active audience. When writing for print or broadcasting on television, it’s essentially a one-sided conversation; its like talking to a brick wall. Posting news on social media fosters this new author/audience relationship we have never seen before. It facilitates engagement between the author and the audience and gives the audience a voice.

Anthony Adornato discusses the change of the audience’s role in his book, “Mobile and Social Media Journalism: A Practical Guide for Multimedia Journalists." People are no longer just audience members, but they have become “a source of news items, as they create their own content.”

In 2015, Walter L. Scott was killed by a police officer named Michael Slager in South Carolina. The media was convinced that Slager was provoked and shot Scott as a self-defense mechanism. There was only footage from Slager’s dash camera.

However, a video surfaced days later proving that Slager shot Scott unprovoked five times, then proceeded to tamper with evidence by placing his own taser right next to Scott’s body. Slager claimed that Scott took the taser and tried to attack him, but the video reveals that this was not the case. Another officer who arrived at the scene watched Slager tamper with the scene and idly stood by.

Feidin Santana, a passerby, witnessed and recorded the event. From there, major news outlets including NBC news, ABC news, and The New York Times asked for Santana's permission to share the video on their platforms.

The video helped sentence Slager to 20 years in prison in 2017. By taking this video and sharing it with the media, Feidin Santana became an active audience member who helped to bring justice to Walter L. Scott’s family.

However, because anyone can post anything on social media, misinformation has been on the rise.

This morning, a photo of Dylan O’Brien and Tom Holland appeared on my Instagram explore page:

A photoshopped picture of celebrities Dylan O'Brien and Tom Holland. | Source: @dylanobrienna via Instagram

The photo has clearly been photoshopped.

One user, however, commented on the post, “Omg my two favorite people met😭😭😭”

This is a harmless example of the spread of misinformation. Maybe these two actors have met before, but not in this instance. With the rise of social media and new technology that accompanies it, it’s easy to create lies and even easier to get people to believe them.

That’s why now more than ever, the ability to fact-check is an important skill for journalists to master.

On April 1st, 1989, KING-TV broadcasted live in the wake of the Seattle Space Needle collapse. Before many people could recognize that this was an April Fools’ Day prank pulled off by the comedy show, Almost Live!, people were sent into a mass panic.

That was 31 years ago. Imagine if Almost Live! pulled that prank today, and how viral it would have gone if social media was as influential as it is now. The broadcast was featured on one station for a few minutes, then it was off the air. If this were posted on social media, it could be reposted, shared with others, and just like that, this misinformation would have spread like wildfire.

This scenario is a bit more harmful than the Instagram post, so just as it’s important for journalists and active audience members to be mindful of what they post, it’s just as important to verify the validity of the content.

In the three weeks I’ve been in my Mobile and Social Media Journalism class, I’ve quickly learned that each platform has its own “language.” You only have 280 characters on Twitter to get your message out. To captivate your audience, your tweet needs to be brief, yet punchy enough to draw in your audience.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has a 3000 character count per post. There’s a bit more room for explanation and the language is more professional.

Here is a comparison of my latest tweet and LinkedIn posts. They’re both meant to share and celebrate my first blog entry. They direct my audience to the same link, yet notice how the language differs from one another. The tweet is short and punchy, while the LinkedIn post is drawn-out, yet professional.

Essentially, the ability for journalists to create content and tailor it to appeal to each social media platform is extremely important in the mobile and social media journalism world.

With the rise of social media, more and more news outlets are developing a mobile-first mindset.

Print outlets are publishing their content online before stories appear in the papers while TV stations are having their reporters use their iPhones to produce stories that will appear on social media and on-air.

As the journalism world turns to a mobile approach, it's easy for journalists to lose sight of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Code of Ethics. The code highlights four principles journalists are encouraged to practice: Seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent.

These principles enable journalists to provide the public with information while being as accurate and fair as possible. Without these principles, we lose sight of what journalism is and why journalists write.

As long as we keep this in mind, social media can be a useful tool that will keep changing the ways of journalism.

Do you remember your first social media post? Feel free to share it in the comments or to email me at brookelauryn918@gmail.com