Social media verses Mainstream media

Social media have helped many news agencies gain traction around the world. However, news organisations are becoming increasingly worried about the potentially disruptive effect of social media on their business models. To keep up, the mainstream media have been forced to embrace social media to disseminate information to the world. 

The effect of social media is overestimated in the short terms and underestimated in the long term. Mainstream media are adopting social media especially with blogging and Twitter in order to keep up with a wide array of Internet users. Gone are the days that mainstream media owned news and would release it to the public when they deemed fit to do so. There is a transformation for journalist from being the gatekeeper of information to sharing it in the public space (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et.). The mainstream media has to embrace citizen journalism in order to keep up with the growing number of online users who rely on the internet for news. 

Despite the influx of information on the social media platform  we cannot say that the end of journalism has come more sooner than we expected. This is because information is not journalism. The social media provides a lot of things but not journalism. Journalism requires discipline, accountability, analysis, explanation, and context. Journalism adds explanation, analysis and judgement to the news. However, despite all these, journalist should never compete with the internet. This is because the internet has no operating protocols. Information is propagated from one blogger to another, one mask to another. 

The social media might win the battle but this does not mean that the mainstream media is dead. We still require the mainstream media to account the information. The social media should express remorse when it comes to posting some information. Imagine receiving news about the death of your relative from the social media. Though it is a fast way of diffusing information, the bloggers and other users should contemplate the consequences of what they post.