The Washington Post looks at the “millions of independent creators are reshaping the way people get their informationespecially younger viewers.”
News consumption reached a crisis point around the world during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than managed websites by traditional media, according to the latest report. Digital news reporting by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in five adults under the age of 24 use TikTok as a news source, according to the report, an increase of five percentage points from last year. According to the UK Office of Communications, young adults in the UK I now spend more time watching TikTok than streaming TV.. This shift is driven in part by a desire for “more accessible, informal and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists,” the Reuters Institute report said, adding that consumers are seeking “more relevant” information. …”
While a few national publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than a decade ago, the economics of journalism have changed . Reputable media outlets have seen a drop in traffic to them social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers might have previously spent with them now goes to creators. Even some news outlets that began life on the Internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shutting down in April, Vice go bankrupt and Gawker closing its doors for the second time in February. The trend is expected to continue. “There is no reasonable reason to expect that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because as they age,” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute, said in the report, which is based on an online survey of about 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States. ..
While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists who collect new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes posing as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more “chaotic and contradictory,” said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to being both informed and misinformed about the world. events. “The Internet makes it possible to offer a lot more content and reach all kinds of people,” Rosen said. “But it also encourages the spread of misinformation.”
The article notes that “some content creators do not follow the same ethical guidelines that serve as a guide in more traditional newsrooms, particularly creators who seek to build an audience based on outrage.”
The article also points out that “the consequences for society are still being revealed.”
