Symbiosis Between Newspapers and Social Media

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).