Informing the Public in the Internet Age
April 16
The profusion of low-cost media production and distribution has led to the rise of an alternative citizen-led media sector. Is this a passing fad of enthusiastic amateurs or the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of the way media and news are produced and consumed? Will the current trends lead to more information, better information, and better informed people or to an infinite stream of unreliable chatter? Will it lead to a more politically engaged populace or to an increasingly polarized society that picks its sources of information to match its biases and ignorance?
Readings
- Persephone Miel and Rob Faris, News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age (read executive summary)
- RonNell Anderson Jones, Litigation, Legislation, and Democracy in a Post-Newspaper America (Section I only, remaining optional)
- Federal Communications Commission, Information Needs of Communities (read executive summary, skim overview)
- Brendan Nyhan, Biases Abound (video, watch all)
Optional Readings
- Jonathan Zittrain, 2009 Richard S. Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press (the lecture starts at 19:45)
Videos Watched in Class
Links
Class Discussion
I tend to agree with the gist of the Miel and Faris, Berkman Report that argues there is a merging of traditional media reporting and online independent blogging. For instance, today at around 2:45 the terror attack occurred in Boston. At 3:15 I saw a notice on twitter and googled it to see what was happening. None of the first page of google links were to major media resources, they were all to minor blogs that were carrying the story which is where I got my information. So for breaking news it can be quite often a minor blogger or on facebook/twitter where a story breaks for the first time. Conversely, I've noticed a marked decline in the online stories of the traditional Canadian Newspaper sites. I often go to CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to browse the news and I've noticed quite often that they revise their online stories continually to add a fact here and there like a blog. In doing so they often make mistakes in their haste and it seems as though their articles are of no higher quality than an independent bloggers... Joshywonder 20:59, 15 April 2013 (EDT)
Like everyone else, I can't stop thinking about the tragedy in Boston today. The event was particularly timely for a class about journalism, because it is a pretty telling case study about informing the public in the Internet age. Indeed you could see many of the positive and negative effects of public participation in media, as presented by the Berkman report from Persephone Miel and Robert Faris and the FCC report from Steven Waldman.
I initially heard about the explosions on Facebook from a post by a friend based in NYC who was watching a live stream of the event. Then I immediately searched online to find out more information from a reputable news source. Even though social media broke the news for me, I still needed a journalist for verification and confirmation. But the New York Times and Boston Globe only had basic, incomplete information at this point. So I jumped back over to social media, where information was readily and rapidly flowing. However, finding credible information and assembling a coherent report of what had happened turned out to be incredibly challenging. Twitter became a hot bed of misinformation (i.e. of alleged perpetrators), insensitive scheduled tweets, graphic images I wanted to avoid, general shock, speculation, retweet hoaxes, and conflicting reports. It felt like a highly visible news room flooded with all the crap that usually gets filtered out. One tweet even read, "everyone just chill for a sec until confirmed reports come in."
So right away, I could see the advantages and disadvantages of participatory media outlets and traditional news outlets. I needed professional journalists to confirm information for me, to give me an objective and authoritative source. But the news outlets moved too slow. So I turned to social media to give me updates and reactions, even if they were inaccurate. For me, any information was better than none at the time. Ultimately, I found myself glued to CNN while perusing Twitter and Facebook and texting everyone I knew. It felt as though the participatory and traditional media were working in concert with one another, satisfying different needs. Looking back now, I think there is a place for both traditional journalists and community driven-news so as long as each focuses on what they do best (news outlets: slower but accurate reports, social media: speedy but not always accurate reports) and not try to serve the function of the other. The Banyan Project seems like an interesting hybrid. Anyway, my heart goes out to the victims on this sad day. Asmith 00:37, 16 April 2013 (EDT)
When I read the assignment summary/description for this week which included a reference to the alternative, citizen-led media sector and asked, "Is this a passing fad of enthusiastic amateurs or the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of the way media and news are produced and consumed?", my instinct was to answer with the one word: both. And when I say "both", I mean that what we are seeing happen with media as a whole is the inclusion of enthusiastic amateurs as well as a fundamental restructuring of the way media and news are contained. One only needs to look at the number of direct references in the so-called mainstream, traditional media to social networking. The initial coverage of yesterday's bombing of the Boston Marathon including repeated use of amateur (presumably cell phone) video and still shots by the mainstream media as well as repeating twitter posts. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that as the old, traditional media begins to enjoy less consumption (Newsweek gave up its print edition this last December and long gone are the days of the three main news media TV channels - ABC, CBS and NBC, who have all lost their share of the market to the likes of CNN, FOX, MSNBC and online sources) while relatively new media (or at least new compared to the traditional sources) such as Drudge, Huffington Post and any of the millions of bloggers continue to enjoy large and in some cases constantly increasing shares of the market. As the Miel and Faris article states, "The distinctions between professional and amateur are blurring, and the definitions of commercial, public, and community media are shifting." It's no longer one or the other, but how much of each component does anyone news/media source choose to use in order to attract information consumers. I would even throw the spectrum of hard news versus opinion in there. I also think the Miel and Faris article summarized it well when they said: "Understanding these trends requires a broader and more holistic view of the media environment than isolating new or participatory media, terms that are losing value as meaningful distinctions."
The Jones article stated that, "Scholars and commentators have been closely monitoring this decline for several years, and much has been written about the ways in which the demise of traditional mainstream media might negatively impact the flow of information to the public, and ultimately undermine the strength of our democracy." I disagree. Information consumers must simply learn to adjust their understanding of the sources of the information they receive. It is absolutely essential to be critical of every source of information and attempt to analyze it objectively and without personal bias if the truth is ultimately the goal. It's not as if the traditional print media was immune to bias or inaccuracies. Facts are obviously of value. Opinions are also of value if they are viewed as such. The internet and "citizen journalists", bloggers and individual producers of information have value in that they bring all of these to the table and therefore it becomes critically important to discern what they have to offer before properly consuming it. The most important (and critical to democracy) things that can happen is to be able to draw a distinction between hard news (i.e. what happened) and opinion/editorial pieces. Very often today we have people wearing two hats - they are both consumers as well as producers. And sometimes one effects the other.CyberRalph 09:42, 16 April 2013 (EDT)
One cannot deny the influence of mass media in all walks of life. Whether we examine the domestic or international political landscape, consumer trends, economic development, social change, celebrity gossip, humanitarian disasters, or anything else in our modern surroundings, media shapes our thoughts and actions. Our readings and the video this week draw attention to our current media world: everyone is a reporter, an author, and an editor.
A few months ago, I read an interesting political science article by Matthew Baum titled: Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public. Soft news is defined as entertainment-oriented news, much of what we see on late night T.V. Baum sheds light on an important aspect of news interpretation and analysis, highlighting education as the nucleus. He notes that soft news diminishes as respondents move up the education ladder. In other words, as people become more educated, they consider preferences, question validity, and make decisions based on a broader universe of options when presented with new data (they don’t believe everything they read, hear, or watch). Brendan Nyhan's video about fact-checking is somewhat associated with this logic. I’m not implying that those with lower educational levels believe everything they hear and avoid checking facts; nor am I saying that highly educated individuals cannot be influenced by the subtle nuances of mass media. If false claims are repeated enough, noted in Nyhan's video, people will tend to believe those claims, whether educated or not. I do think, however, that examining media-interpretation from an educational slant is an interesting way to approach this analysis. Does education increase motivation to confirm facts? Does education change one's interpretation when obtaining news from social media or other news outlets? What are your thoughts about the role of education in our high-choice media environment?
Primary news and social media news are two distinct information-generating avenues. When evaluating primary news sources, information about the world often comes from "political elites," i.e., those who own and manage large entities that provide news. Although the primary networks (NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN/FOX) provide more clear-cut data than other news sources or entertainment equivalents, we obtain information through filters, making us secondhand consumers. The telephone game is not necessarily the best analogy, because information can often be presented consistently, across media platforms. However, to some degree, all information about the world is slightly skewed, based on the translator who shares the information and the number of touch-points the information travels through before we receive it. This is the reality of traditional primary news.
On the other hand, social media news is very different, because it's not automatically filtered through the eyes of "elites"—the information we obtain often comes from a direct source. In the article From Cold Calls to Community Building, an interesting quote merits attention: "Social media creates a new layer of vulnerability for a reporter compared with what we do traditionally, which is less personal....Trust is a huge issue, especially when you think about [it] on a sourcing level. A lot of people aren't going to trust a reporter they don't know or a publication they don’t know....[P]eople are much more willing to trust each other" (LaFrance, 2012). We trust others alike and those who have direct experiences with a topic of interest; this is the change that we’re seeing with social media. We're moving from a filtered news-generating world, to streamlined information-gathering reality, i.e., those closest to the news who are impacted the most (the real reporters) provide the best information.
Miel and Faris support this claim stating that, "members of this growing audience [i.e., the Internet] are not only consumers of the news—many are shaping the news agenda for themselves and others: selecting, combining, and commenting on stories as well as creating their own. It is driven by the rapid expansion of the number of people and organizations newly engaged as authors, editors, and publishers" (Miel and Faris, 2008). The final statement of this quote illustrates this week's thesis. We are all reporters and through social media avenues we now have the potential to share our stories surrounding countless topics, to mass audiences.
What do you think about this transition? Will we lack factual information as more non-experts transmit news? Or, will news be better-off as information emerges from diverse sources, across unique platforms, from unfiltered perspectives? Zak Paster 10:35, 16 April 2013 (EDT)