The Use Of Social Media In Reporting

It has been nearly two decades since the web has taken off and changed the world, reformed how data is kept, sought, distributed and absorbed. The gradually expanding of this influence has spread so wide it does not only impact organizations but also areas such as pharmaceuticals, media, legislative issues as well as affecting geographic, social limits and even an individuals’ everyday life.

As stated by Boyd and Ellison (2007) social networking sites are web platforms where people can verbalize a summary of various customers with whom they share an affiliation, assemble an open or semi-open profile inside a constrained structure and see and explore their once-over of affiliations and those made by others inside the system. Social media also known as social networking sites (SNS) have been known to have a large impact on its users. Many newsrooms use SNSs’ like Twitter to get their stories published. According to "Top 10 Twitter Statistics" 2018, Twitter has an impressive 335 million monthly active users. Journalist are becoming more interested in using the online platform of Twitter as it has become a news-breaking tool and somewhat influential with its users. In this essay I will be discussing the use of social media in reporting as well as any pros or cons in reporting in this particular manner.

The means of news consumption today has radically developed over time and is largely different from pre-satellite news when one would wait for the paper to come in the morning or anticipated the 9pm news on TV. There is a constant increasing number of consumers going online for their news updates, sports updates, political updates and news in general.

The Internet offers numerous open doors for regular people to communicate with one another and with writers, than the pre-Internet age. A statistic report on Singapore’s digital usage showed that three-quarters of Singaporeans turn to their smartphones to access the news and that out of the majority 61% turned to social media to read up on the news. With technology constantly being improved and advancing, people are now starting to become overly dependent on their mobile devices and are ‘glued’ to their smart devices. The number of journalists that turn to social media to source for news reporting and for information has been increasing. Despite this number increasing there is still a large portion of them who still turn to traditional source gathering which has some questioning the credibility of the information gathered from social media. Even though there are many journalist using social media to gather information only 10% of them find that social media is reliable for sourcing stories.

When journalists turn to social media they have to be cautious with the sources they find and where they find them. Fake news is propaganda that is deliberately posted to hoax eager reporters with wrong information. There have been instances of reporters taking information from ones Myspace accounts or even Twitter accounts however, the issue that is being faced is that there are people who recreate these accounts to make them look identical which at times makes it difficult for the reporter to spot which is the real one and which is fake. Issues like this can have serious repercussions when the information being sourced is on someone who is important.