How social media has not changed journalism
During last week’s episode of The Other 51, my dear friend Dr. Jenn Billinson and I talked about the state of social media, past and present.
Jenn (a brilliant scholar and teacher) and I talked about the early days of social media (think early 2010s), and how it felt like it held so much promise. The Arab Spring. Ferguson. How it felt like social media could be this real force for good, for positive change.
It was like this in journalism, too. This was the era of citizen journalism, of widening the net (pun not intend…no, scratch that, pun intended), making journalism broader, more democratic, more responsive.
But now it’s 2023, and all that promise and possibility has vanished. As Jenn and I talked about, Donald Trump’s campaign starting in 2015 and his election in 2016 feels like a line of demarcation for social media.1 The big news in social media is Twitter’s2 slow-motion implosion and the weird search for new platform that’s like Twitter but not Twitter.
I’ve been thinking about this from a journalism point of view a lot lately. I’m nearly a decade removed from my dissertation that looked at the evolution of sports journalism in the digital age. We’re 15-20 years removed from the emergence of the first generation of digital journalism research, and it’s a good time for us to look back at that and think through where we are as an industry.
And here’s where my initial thinking on this has landed:
Social media, and digital media, haven’t really changed the practice of journalism a lot.
OK, so … this is one of those overly bold and provocative statements one makes in essays like this. As you will no doubt notice, I have no data to back this up yet. I’m speaking purely from vibes.
And this isn’t to say that the practice of journalism hasn’t changed at all due to digital and social media. But compared with what might have been, compared with the promise and potential that social media provided us in the early 2010s, there hasn’t been that much change.
Why is that?
Let’s talk normalization.
One of the earliest, and most influential (for me, at least) studies on digital media was published by Jane Singer in 2005. Singer studied journalism blogs during the 2004 U.S. presidential election (W’s reelection)3.
It’s important to remember the space blogs held in digital media back then. In a lot of ways, they were digital media. They were a way for newspapers to enter the digital space. In a lot of ways, they reflected the way newspapers viewed their online editions — as complements to the main product (the print edition, or the stories in the print edition).
Anyway, this is from my dissertation:
Singer found journalists were taking a media format that originated as personal, online diaries and normalizing them, infusing them with journalism’s professional norms and ideals. The journalists, Singer found, also were not using blogs to bring in outside voices but instead were creating a sort of news echo chamber in which they cited other media outlets (often fellow traditional media outlets) rather than elicit audience members’ reactions.
A few years later, Dominic Lasorsa, Seth Lewis and Avery Holton used Singer’s notion of normalizing to study how journalists were using an emerging social platform — Twitter. Again, from my dissertation:
Like Singer seven years earlier, Lasorsa and his colleagues found that reporters were normalizing Twitter, adopting the rules of journalistic norms and practices into their use of the microblogging platform. They also found that reporters were adapting some of their (existing) norms and practices to the conventions of Twitter—most notably the use of opinion within Tweets.
Taken together, the Singer and Lasorsa, Lewis, and Horton studies suggest that when a new communications platform emerges, journalists are predisposed to normalize it, to take the new media form and shape it to fit existing norms, practices, and routines rather than allow those practices to evolve to fit the new format.
So with normalization in mind, let’s look back at that bold statement I made a few paragraphs to the north.
Certainly, digital and social media have accelerated journalism. You could argue this is the single most important change to the practice of journalism over the past 20 years, and it’s not a small one. Also, I argue that digital and social media emphasize the constant stream of information over individual stories — a change in journalism that echoes Alfred Hermida’s work on ambient journalism.
Big changes, sure.
But how else has the day-to-day practice of journalism changed? Think of norms, values, routines. News values, on the whole, have not appreciably changed since I learned them from Steve Koski back in the winter of 1996. What made a story then makes a story now. Sourcing has not appreciably changed (again, speaking on general vibes here). Sports writers are still talking to coaches, quarterbacks, star players, the rookie’s mom. What makes a good quote is still the same.
So much of what we do and what we teach as journalists has, in fact, not really changed in decades.
That’s not a failure of journalism or of journalism education. It’s a byproduct of normalization.
Now, the business of journalism … that has fundamentally changed. More on that in a future newsletter.
The Other 51
Episode 179: North Star with Sam Borden
Listen Here
Sam Borden of ESPN joins Brian this week to talk about reporting, interviewing, and life as a foreign correspondent.
Sam has probably the best job title of anyone we’ve had as a guest on the podcast — Global Sports Correspondent for ESPN. Sam talks about how he got that job, how he built a successful career as a sports journalist despite not being a sports fan, and how he finds stories to write.
Sam and Brian also talk about what life is really like as a foreign correspondent. It’s not all Hemingway and lunches on the Seine. Sam talks about finding fixers who can help you report in foreign languages, and how he tracked down Darko Milicic at an apple orchard in Serbia.
Sam also talks about the biggest difference between interviewing for broadcast and interviewing for a print piece, how the concept of the North Star can help any journalist.
Click here to Listen to The Other 51
(And subscribe - next week, Joe Posnanski joins me to talk about his new book.)
Here’s a mind-eff for the day — that was SEVEN years ago. This year’s college freshmen were in sixth grade when Trump was elected.
Not calling it X here. Nope. Sorry. Not happening. I wish news organizations would just keep calling it Twitter rather than “X - the site formerly known as Twitter.”
Your second mindeff of the day — that is as close to our next election as W’s re-election was from Ronald Regan’s re-election in 1984. Time is a hideous beast.