Newspapers and Social Media Create
a Big Symbiosis Instead Rivalry
Enrique Castejon-Lara*
Abstract:
Social
media have been increasing their relevance in contemporary society, including as
an emerging abundant news source. For that reason, newspapers cannot ignore
them. However, they have to carefully watch de information flows from them to
evade risk of using fake facts in their reports.
In the last
decade, the habitual news stream has been changing in the world because of the
appearance of social media. For that circumstance, many mass communication
specialists have declared that the existence of newspapers is in risk.
However, today
that change in the mass communication world is evidencing a very different
situation. Social media are not replacing newspapers nor these ones are affecting
social media. On the contrary, both communication systems have been
complementing each other. Right now, it is occurring a symbiotic process between
both current information systems —journalism and people on-line media.
Certainly,
journalism has found in social media a new and explosive news source; but in a
very raw manner. For that reason, it has realized that the information richness
of those media includes also huge jeopardies, because in the social media news’
torrent comes indiscriminately some true facts and a lot of fake data.
In short,
increasing relevance in contemporary society of those new information resources
cannot be ignore by newspapers —but they have the ethical obligation of
checking the facts that social media ‘reveal’ (Castejon-Lara, 2015); because, on
the flow content of those means, there are many messages with different intentions
and journalists have to revise them in order to inform honestly to audiences.
Popularity
of social media, finally, is a real temptation for news manipulators,
propagandists, and unscrupulous public relation specialists. So that, reporters
have the obligation of checking those aspects taken from social media before
processing news. Actually, audiences are expecting just that —that journalists,
after processing news, offer a trust version of that they previously read on social
media.
Reference:
CASTEJON-LARA, Enrique. Interpretative Reporting,
CreativeSpace (Amazon), 2015
*Tenure professor for Central University of Venezuela, UCV (Spanish
acronym).
