A short while ago, I used to be a journalism student instead of a digital media student. During my two-year stint, my journalism cohort and myself were constantly told that we shouldn’t be consuming most of our news from social media.
In a way I understand; as a journalist, credibility is everything, and on social media credibility isn’t exactly as important when there’s only 280 characters. However, instead of waiting for legacy media outlets such as newspapers to report the news, it’s much quicker to keep up with what’s happening in terms of major events and newsworthy content, through related hashtags.
Legacy media is struggling to adapt in this digitalised era and because of this, newfound citizen journalists are rising from the ashes – Twitter mainly being their weapon of choice. As Johnson (2009, p. 2) stated, “It was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.”
What this quote means is that we the users are able to collectively ‘report’ on an issue and through a culmination of mass aggregation on these social media platforms we’re able to build a credible report of the event that is taking place. This is why tweets, when produced in this way, create value and also why citizen journalism is seemingly more accepted and mainstream in this digitalised era.
While both legacy media and citizen journalism have their place, it’s safe to say that the role of social media and also the way we consume our news is changing.
Below is a video I produced about citizen journalism.
References
Johnson, S 2009, ‘How Twitter will change the way we live,’ Time, viewed 15 September 2018, https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/johnson-time-2009.pdf
tanaearmstrong.wordpress.com 
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Hi Tanae, nice work. The ‘140-character quote’ you have included is great. Here’s one from Ken Lerer you also might find relevant. He is the co-founder of The Huffington Post and current chairman for Buzzfeed. He described the challenges of traditional media as: “You have to fix the plane while you’re flying it.” I guess to sum up, Web 2.0 and the rise of ‘produsage’ has fueled a new paradigm where digital is now the focus. Keep up the good work 🙂
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Hey Michael,
Thanks for your feedback and comment, I really appreciate it!
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I really like how you showed contrasting the perspectives of Journalists (or journalism students) compared to avid digital and social media users (or digital and social media students), both of which have valid points about the validity, and reliability of information. I think that from a journalistic standpoint, it is important to get your information from credible sources. However, I also think that if thousands of people are live streaming, tweeting, posting and commenting on a event in motion that in itself can become a reliable source. Hence the thousands of pebbles make a bridge of reliability, and I think that legacy media hasn’t accepted this phenomenon yet. Furthermore, having an event being reported on by both individuals and journalisms can eliminate bias on individual posts if an individual reads widely. However, fake news is a really big issue, so of course only relying on citizen journalism is risky. I think that having both traditional journalism and citizen journalism functioning simultaneously is beneficial to the spread of information and news, and I think that you summarized this clearly and simply within the constraints of the 150 word blog post.
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