By Caroline Grass
September 10, 2023
Social media has fundamentally changed how people get their news and interact with the journalists who write the stories they read. Comment sections, reposts, shares, likes and other communication options allow the audience to engage with reporters and let people know their opinions. In many ways this extra communication is positive, it holds journalists more accountable for what they are writing and allows readers to share their thoughts, but the scale at which stories (and mistakes) can go viral can make posting and sharing content daunting.
To learn more about being an effective multimedia journalist, my mobile journalism class is reading “Mobile and Social Journalism: A Practical Guide for Multimedia Journalism” by Anthony Adornato, chair of the Broadcast and Digital Journalism Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. This book highlights the shifting news landscape in our increasingly online world and offers tips and advice from leading multimedia journalists in the field.
After reading the first few chapters, I found Adornato’s tips about interacting with the audience helpful as a young journalist. In the first chapter, he writes that our job as journalists is to help the “audience navigate through the noise.” Even though anyone can post online, not everyone is considered a journalist. The negative aspect of the fact that anyone can post is the rise of misinformation and disinformation.
Fake and misleading information runs rampant on social media, so being able to trust a journalist to bring you the news you need is especially important. Especially to bring you local news, as stories about local government, schools, community groups and other issues normally impact a person’s day-to-day life much more than the national headlines.
Fake news spreads rapidly and confuses readers as seen by a 2016 Pew Research Center study that found 64% of survey respondents said fabricated news stories cause “a great deal of confusion” about basic facts of events.
Also, with the sheer volume of content we are bombarded with on social media all the time— most of it not even news information but entertainment— valuable and newsworthy information is often buried in our feeds or not in our feeds at all if the algorithm doesn’t select it.
I’m taking the tips from the book to heart and working to post consistently on all platforms to engage with my audience. While posting about my work and asking for my audience to reach out to me with ideas seems awkward right now, I look forward to it becoming a more authentic and easy process with practice.
Comments