In an 18 October podcast he did this year with Ezra Klein of Vox, Jay Rosen criticised the news media for conformity, identifying the tendency of different news rooms to report on the same stories and poking fun at their desire to get the scoop first rather than to cover something original and unique.
When I wrote for magazines I had this experience so I know it is true. The editor at a small outlet would email me asking if I could do 500 words for a story about something that had just been broken by one of the major outlets.
This kind of piggybacking however seems to me to be more normal now, in the era of social media. Since the emergence of the internet, news editors have always been able to see which stories got the most traction in the community. But now, with Twitter especially, they can see exactly what people are sharing and how they are sharing it: either with approval, criticism, irony or some other attitude layered over the original story. Editors know exactly what people want to read because they can see several different metrics measuring what links get clicked on.
Social media has not only changed the way that journalists see themselves, it has changed the way people use news, making them more likely to share and engage with stories that they are already familiar with because it is these stories that satisfy a deep human need for connection with others. I wrote a number of blogposts earlier this year about how stories are used on places such as Twitter. The first of these posts came on 2 July and it was titled ‘The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress’. In it, I provided a theory of narratives, describing the way that people in the community use stories in order to create community: to bring them closer to allies and to distance themselves even more completely from enemies. I said that the way they do this is similar to the way that people barrack for sports teams in national leagues: the contest is a zero-sum game, where the prize is a scare resource and there can only be one winner.
But in fact there can be many winners, and on 21 July I continued the discussion with a post titled ‘The left-right tango is a dead end’ in which I talked about the need to find the best policies regardless of which side of politics introduces it. We need, if we want to move toward a sustainable future, to take the best policies from wherever they come, and use them to expand the pie for all members of the community.
Journalist Katharine Murphy talks about the dynamics of social media in her new book, ‘On Disruption’, which I reviewed on 9 July on the blog. In it, she identifies the election to the office of US president of Donald Trump as an artefact of the social media era. Others have pointed to the fact that no Australian prime minister has been able to serve out a full term at the head of a government since the invention of Twitter. Social media has changed the ways that we use the media, as it has changed the very nature of democracy. Our thinking about the media has to take that into account. Murphy herself works for the Guardian, a left-leaning outlet that operates on three continents and that has used its ideological position, as have other outlets, to build a community. Many people in it pay for the news they receive.
So the “view from nowhere” is gradually disappearing as people form communities around different news outlets that validate the positions they themselves hold about issues. In this new environment, of course, there will also be a place for a news organisation that takes a more objective view of the world, and which deals with issues in a dispassionate manner, such as the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. But objectivity will gradually become the exception rather than the rule because of the economics of the news: people like to back their own team in the contest.
When I wrote for magazines I had this experience so I know it is true. The editor at a small outlet would email me asking if I could do 500 words for a story about something that had just been broken by one of the major outlets.
This kind of piggybacking however seems to me to be more normal now, in the era of social media. Since the emergence of the internet, news editors have always been able to see which stories got the most traction in the community. But now, with Twitter especially, they can see exactly what people are sharing and how they are sharing it: either with approval, criticism, irony or some other attitude layered over the original story. Editors know exactly what people want to read because they can see several different metrics measuring what links get clicked on.
Social media has not only changed the way that journalists see themselves, it has changed the way people use news, making them more likely to share and engage with stories that they are already familiar with because it is these stories that satisfy a deep human need for connection with others. I wrote a number of blogposts earlier this year about how stories are used on places such as Twitter. The first of these posts came on 2 July and it was titled ‘The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress’. In it, I provided a theory of narratives, describing the way that people in the community use stories in order to create community: to bring them closer to allies and to distance themselves even more completely from enemies. I said that the way they do this is similar to the way that people barrack for sports teams in national leagues: the contest is a zero-sum game, where the prize is a scare resource and there can only be one winner.
But in fact there can be many winners, and on 21 July I continued the discussion with a post titled ‘The left-right tango is a dead end’ in which I talked about the need to find the best policies regardless of which side of politics introduces it. We need, if we want to move toward a sustainable future, to take the best policies from wherever they come, and use them to expand the pie for all members of the community.
Journalist Katharine Murphy talks about the dynamics of social media in her new book, ‘On Disruption’, which I reviewed on 9 July on the blog. In it, she identifies the election to the office of US president of Donald Trump as an artefact of the social media era. Others have pointed to the fact that no Australian prime minister has been able to serve out a full term at the head of a government since the invention of Twitter. Social media has changed the ways that we use the media, as it has changed the very nature of democracy. Our thinking about the media has to take that into account. Murphy herself works for the Guardian, a left-leaning outlet that operates on three continents and that has used its ideological position, as have other outlets, to build a community. Many people in it pay for the news they receive.
So the “view from nowhere” is gradually disappearing as people form communities around different news outlets that validate the positions they themselves hold about issues. In this new environment, of course, there will also be a place for a news organisation that takes a more objective view of the world, and which deals with issues in a dispassionate manner, such as the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. But objectivity will gradually become the exception rather than the rule because of the economics of the news: people like to back their own team in the contest.
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