Journalism is Failing and Social Media is to Be Blamed

   Journalism is Failing and Social Media is to Be Blamed

Print journalism now facing an all time low, big print media cooperation are now playing the finger pointing game with popular social media networks.

by Tonieann Harvey

Journalism has experienced rapid downfalls not because of its lack of content or originality but because of the vast growth of online journalism. While analyzing four (4) different articles giving insight into the future of journalism and reasons why it could fail in the future. Here is what i have analyzed on the matter.
 Journalism companies would need a great deal of support to save their companies but not from technology companies. I greatly agreed with the recent Columbia Journalism Review article on Facebook should treat the cause, not the symptoms, of journalism’s plight which points out that “It is wrong for technology companies to fund journalism it was also unnecessary”. Funding an industry that didn’t take its chances in advancing with the rest of media shouldn’t be the technology companies' problems but should be their own. Print media, specifically newspapers are struggling, these outlets which were the future of journalism have now turned to blame big named companies such as Facebook and Google for stealing there means of income which were Ads. In the recent article Regulating Facebook and Google won’t save journalism by Alex Shephard  which says“making advertising less efficient, would probably also have to be implemented.... create a more equitable economic arrangement”. However, this won't save journalism as society is ways to communicate with readers are changing. 

In her recent interview article Jill Abramson: The bleak part picture is the death of the local paper by Rachel Cooke she touched on the issues on whether journalism would survive. The media may still be intact if the job is done right with well investigated content but could also fail if they don’t reach the investment of large cooperation. Revenue seems to be the issue why most journalism companies will fail rather than quality content. 
The article which got my attention the most was in the recent Vanity Fair article The news is dying but journalism will not, How the media can prevent 2020 from becoming 2016 say that “Trump era, the best of it has grabbed us. So as we search for clues on how journalists can repair the forever broken state..”. In the era of Donald Trump there is never a moment where journalism cannot strive through given the content that the president has given them to write about. The outlet of these stories might be suffering but the content itself is not. Due to the use of social media and the unlimited access to it, the news access has become easier. Buying a newspaper, a day takes money out your pocket's vs using the news app on your phone where you have access to news outlets such as The New York Times for free. The smartphones have made it easier to capture real time emotions; news and publish it faster to the public ,than say waiting for the 6’o clock news. The smartphone era has now changed the way the news travels and expanding its reach to a larger region beyond the source without following any protocols or policies. However, the difference with social media is that it may tend to be biased in the way it delivers the news. 

In concluding in order to save journalism new ways of producing news must be implemented since it is a technological generation, the content of news must now be mindful of what captures of the attention of the audience with respects to race, religion and age.