How social media and bloggers are killing the news

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Carol Forsloff - Social media advocates laud the fact anyone can report the news from Twitter and Facebook platforms and multi-media devices, but  there's one thing people also value. That's having the truth and the facts, which means trust, something people don't always get from bloggers and social media.

In addition to that, research demonstrates that quality information tends to last longer and have more value, is cited more and turned to during times of serious events.

Is our news better, more factual, more detailed, enlightened?  Or have these social media and citizen journal platforms so watered-down and demoralized writers that people are turning away? 

What happens when there is an outbreak of violence in a community or a critical event folks need to have serious information?

Sometimes bloggers and citizen journalists are right there on the scene.  And sometimes they make good reports with pictures and relevant ideas.  Yet there are those from armchairs who propose to do the same as journalists and then from a distance with little educational foundation, or practice in journalism, to warrant a read at all.  Yet write they do, therefore clogging the Internet with half truths that people read and wonder about and sometimes believe as truth.


In other words, do people turn to NBC, ABC or CBS online or on television where citizens opinions and viewpoints are integrated?   Or do they turn to citizen news sites for established news?   It's likely most folks will look for their hard news on established places and for extra information from citizen opinion pieces and details found in the community from those same types of informed citizens.

 On the other hand, most of the public does not know when a citizen journalist has simply rewritten what is on television at the time or the local newspaper story the original writer did from first-hand sources or original research.

Furthermore, if the public turns only to social media and citizen news sites as if these are primary sources, what consequences might there be for the truth and the facts to be checked?


In asking that question over and over from Portland, Oregon to Natchitoches, Louisiana, one finds repeatedly people maintain their local paper to be valued.  Even the small town paper that writes of basketball games on Saturday afternoons is treasured by a local community that wants to know how friends and neighbors feel.

On the citizen reporting level, and the traditional level, it's good to have that mix of local and world news.  Citizen news sites maintain they offer that local point of view from ordinary citizens  and that anyone can write news.

Are these, for the most part, citizen reports of local events or original research with new information to share?

An investigation reveals many do a good job and many do not.  Many of the stories are simply recitations of today's newspapers, the ones that are touted by the creators of citizen journals as not as useful as citizen sites.  These stories, rewritten from usually front pages, then go out on news bunches in big bundles over the Internet, and accent volume over value.  Google web spiders and Alexa don't think before zooming in or highlighting an idea, event, or information.  They simply go where they see the traffic has gone.

A rewritten story as a feature along with other sources can be developed and expanded upon, making an entirely new or substantially different story.  Simply rewriting one original story does not.

In addition, "agenda writers" are often bloggers.  Journalists use blogging platforms but often provide some background of themselves that differentiates them as practiced writers of a certain sort.  But agenda writers are something different.  These are writers of particular political views directed towards certain personalities to undermine or extol, take your pick, with little balance in theme or in purpose.

The traditional journalist is eventually undone with agendas since news writers are required to cover a broad range of topics factually.  It also has at least the exposure to ethics in reporting.

The exceptions, of course, are all around us:  those journalists who take liberties, yes license, with facts.  On the other hand, peers know the difference, while the public might often not.  That means the person who was the plumber in a town miles away from yours is able to write the news of your little spot just as well, or at least that's the way the argument states.  But the feel of the crowd, the sounds and the expressions and special nuances that come from one's knowledge of things is helpful for sure with the news.

Citizen journalism was originally conceived to supplement, not replace,the traditional news media.  But that is not what is happening nor celebrated by conferences where this different trend is extolled.

The message these days, and the celebration as well, is that news bites by anyone, unchecked and unleashed on Twitter, or rewritten from newspaper pages is just as good, just as valuable and likely better than the ordinary newspaper today.

Traffic is driven by volumes of people who have been told their take on the news is important.  That take can be valuable for local insight at the local level where citizens are there in the moment to give information traditional journalists may not be on hand to supply.

But rewritten news information available and existing on newspaper pages at a time when many compete for the advertising dollars that keep them alive?    The Las Vegas Journal's investigative group spent much time and effort citing sites for copying them,  looking at some of this as plagiarism.

One wonders if the demise of newspapers would have been quite so swift and the desperation as great to do more with less, had there not been the message that anyone can, and should, write the news.

Editors, however, are available to support journalists in every venue.  However, experience demonstrates that editing may not be applied in most cases, and certainly in reviewing for articles that might simply be developed from a single article rewritten and using the same key words and phrases for traffic.

It's that traffic, however, that most drives the news.  The news selections come from that traffic and those who are elected to be most prominently featured are often the ones with the most social media votes.

That means your 16-year-old son can write the news about an assassin in France and be at the top of the charts while the newspaper reporter that did the original investigation in France may find fewer votes because he did not engage quite as much.  That reporter was too busy getting the story in the first place.

It also means a free-for-all where "heroes" are hackers, like Julian Assange of Wikileaks, someone who has spent most of his life hacking into organizational activities in a variety of venues and whose background is in computers and technical areas as opposed to communication and news.

Then there is Edward Snowden whose hacking into his company's security materials raised questions about his technique for finding "the government is spying on us."  Everyone had an opinion, but how many asked if Snowden had the journalist's eye to decide whether or not the information was of the nature that should be printed and when.  It's true he had his contacts in the news world, but how many newspapers in the U.S. would consider it in the same way after he had taken the information and traveled with it to China.  Was the reason only to stay in line with some government directive?  Or was there some journalist ethnics book that offered enough questions to make newspapers make their own choices within what those are.

Blogging behavior that allows a writer from Pakistan to write material online, mostly embedded in canned advertising formats, and information gleaned from local city sites, that are called Bohunk News, with Bohunk the town down the road.  But the Pakistan writer has never seen the town nor known any of its people and does the job for some owner somewhere in the Internet jungle who wants readership for the money and for the advertising dollars generated on the site.  It helps kill the local papers even as the proliferation of bloggers are killing mainstream news, at least in its printed form.

Some platforms like Newstrust are striving to improve writer's knowledge, skills and abilities by offering training in combination with Poynter organization, a training program that allows journalists to keep up with trends, ideas and the
reporting rules.

So while social media platforms celebrate what they consider a victory of sorts, and traditional media drowns in the din of condemnation on the one hand and competition by many untrained folk without information on ethics, who loses in the long run?  Who loses when news is written by the popular as much or more than the informed?

Likely the public that depends on the information as sound,fact-checked, detailed and supported in order to make knowledgeable decisions in a democracy.  It may be the reason fewer and fewer people report not trusting the media, an attitude that is growing as rapidly as the ever-expanding citizen journalist folk.

Partnership, not rivalry with newspapers might be the direction that the news will eventually find as the one the public most wants and is served by better than your 16-year-old neighbor or Joe the Plumber without careful supervision and popularity developed through Internet friends. The partnership that just might work is that companionship used by the Huffington Post, where special bloggers, who have expertise in a certain area, pair with trained journalists to create a platform many people trust.

News, people, money, and the Internet

[caption id="attachment_4107" align="alignleft" width="275" caption="People argue their opinions on news"][/caption]

by Michael Cosgrove - What do a 24-hour detox diet, soldiers whooping with delight when they kill the enemy in battle, and Internet news sites have in common? Answer – they all teach us a lot about human behavior and self-preservation.

Many people who decide not to eat for 24 hours in order to ‘purge the system’ will tell you that they do so because their bodies ‘know’ when they contain too many impurities for their own good, impurities which slowly accumulate over time as a result of what they eat. They say that they periodically feel a visceral need to eliminate the various chemicals and other artificial elements that are used in a lot of mass-produced food. It is an instinctive human reaction which kicks in when people realize that their bodies need to be looked after.

The same kind of instinctive reaction can be observed in soldiers. They are acutely aware that they may lose their lives from one instant to the next when they come under fire and suddenly find themselves in an extremely stressful kill-or-be-killed situation. When they manage to kill the enemy and the firing stops they often let out shouts of delight. This may sound like a cruel thing to do, but they are not celebrating like happy kids who won the relay race. They are eliminating the extraordinarily high levels of tension and adrenaline they were pumped up with when they were under mortal threat. This too is a reflexive, natural and necessary human phenomenon.

There is an element of automatic self-preservation to be observed in both of these situations. All living beings have a strong and innate sense of survival and humans are no exception.

Which leads us to the Internet. A new development – it’s a one-second old newborn baby with an as-yet uncut umbilical cord if you compare its relative age to the length of time humans have existed on Earth – the Internet is at the equivalent of a Paleolithic stage of development. Yet it has already become such a crucially interwoven part of our existence and social fabric that the consequences of having to do without it starting tomorrow morning would be incalculable.

The things that happen on the Internet and the uses it is put to vary from uplifting, to harmlessly innocuous, and to downright bad. That isn’t surprising because when all’s said and done it is only a mirror held up to the behavior of those who use it.

Internet sites can be uplifting (arts and culture sites for example), harmless and banal (your local transport authority’s site), and downright bad (neo-fascist sites), but news sites contain the whole gamut of human reaction and intentions, from the best to the worst.

This is because news stories and events can be extremely polarizing. Before the Internet came along papers would just print the news as they saw it and people would buy and read their preferred version of the news and get mad at it or be pleased at it. But rare were those who would walk into a bar to pick a violent argument with someone they’d never met who didn’t share the same opinions on, say, the Mideast or the financial crisis. Those hotheads would either get their noses put out of joint by someone bigger than them or get arrested for threatening behavior or a breach of the peace or something.

But now that we have the Internet along with its increasing numbers of comment threads and forums, some rabid Bin Laden apologist in New Jersey or somewhere can easily, by using a series of digital zeros and ones to turn his thoughts into ‘speech’, tell some gentle young female student in Manila who believes Bin Laden was a terrorist killer that she is “a fascist western boot-licker who deserves to die!” Better still, and even more angrily, he can PUT IT ALL IN CAPS!!! In the same way, a pro-Obama or Palin comment may attract a scathing “Are you for real? I mean, are you?!” And on it goes, these exchanges being conducted from from behind computer screens and avatars such as ‘FreedomCome’ or ‘World’sEndUnite.’ All of this and worse can be read every day on major mainstream press sites.

Unfortunately, the mainstream press has recognized the money-making potential of this phenomena and the fact that more hits, readers and comments translate directly into advertising revenue. That’s why more and more of them offer comment threads on more and more articles, not only articles on art and, say, gardening, but particularly on articles concerning sensitive subjects such as politics, conflict and religion. Reader interaction on this kind of article can become very nasty and attract large amounts of traffic. This is why there are more and more opinion, comment, and op-ed articles on their sites – because that kind of article automatically results in a for-or-against reader reaction.

The mainstream press encourages this reality via the use of a falsely democratic rationale based on ‘reader participation’ and ‘giving the public their say.’ This sounds wonderful in theory, but it has resulted in more and more deleterious debate and provocative article writing, because they can’t resist the temptation to make money.

So much for the mainstream, but what about the alternatives? The blogs and the citizen journalism sites? After all, they proclaim themselves to be at the vanguard of a press revolution which aims to give news back to people without thinking about corporate profit.  But they resort even more to shock tactics and doubtful practices than the mainstream, and the result, far from giving lessons to the mainstream on how a news outlet should be run, takes the worst examples of mainstream practices and exploits them to hitherto unseen levels of unscrupulous conduct.

Citizen journalism and news blogs are to be found in a murky and dangerous sector of the Internet news spectrum, the sector where trolls, flamers, shills and conspiracy theorists congregate, like shoals of piranha fish. These sites mimic the mainstream in appearance, but the content can be much more toxic. Comment threads full of spite, vituperation, recrimination and revenge pullulate like bacteria on so-called ‘opinion’ or ‘op-ed’ articles which are no more than a platform for blatant propaganda. Not only that, even the ‘news’ articles are too often heavily laced with bias using subterfuges such as numerous links to one-sided interpretations of events. All this demonstrates lax editing of articles, their intention, and their factual content too. And it is done this way to attract hits, subscribers and advertising.

One particularly worrying tendency of citizen journalism from the beginning has been its tendency to publish work which announces or supports conspiracy theories or which uses them as part of what purports to be reasoned analysis based on the facts. That it is being accepted is just another part of the shock-horror effort to attract readers. Citizen journalism is becoming cynical before its time, and this phenomenon is, in turn, attracting cynics.

So what does all this have to do with diets, soldiers, self-preservation and human behavior?

I contribute articles to the mainstream press and, until recently, I contributed news and opinion/op-ed to some of the larger citizen journalist sites. And I, as a human being just like anyone else, have been exposed to all I have described above for a long while. I have thus on occasion fallen prey to the temptation to respond in aggressive terms to provocation, I too have harangued certain agenda merchants who pose as analysis writers, and far too many a time have I switched off my computer at the end of an evening feeling angry and wired.

But I've had enough of the violent sentiments and dishonest writing.

This means that although I still write for the mainstream press, I have abandoned its opinion articles and comment threads. It’s all too vexing. I have also stopped contributing to major citizen journalism sites. My mind is telling me that those things are not good for me. My intellect is telling me that the fundamental principles of good journalism are being neglected in the headlong rush to make a profit. My heart tells me I should be somewhere where people who have never met can exchange points of view in a civilized manner, somewhere where writers have a sense of what ethical writing is, somewhere I am glad to log on to, somewhere I can try to forge potentially long-lasting intellectual dialogue with people.

There are many kinds of human behavior, and self-preservation is an instinct. And it is precisely because the nastier of the former have polluted the press that - as is the case of people who want to feel better or soldiers who want to stay alive - the latter has kicked in. Viscerally, and instinctively.