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Social media for the win

Governments and the mainstream news media have been telling us for years not to listen to what you see or hear on social media because it will only be disinformation or misinformation.

Well bad news for those pushing that line... social media has won.

According to news reports, social media has become most people's the main source of news, at least in the USA.

It would seem that in the battle for the hearts, souls, minds and attention of the great unwashed masses, sites such as YouTube, Facebook, X and such have beaten out the mainstream media, despite the dis/misinformation narrative.

This can't bode well for all those news organisations which are actively petitioning to have "big tech" forced into paying them for the use of their headlines and links to their content.

To be honest, I'm not surprised that social media has won this battle because of the hypocrisy demonstrated by traditional news sources.

While claiming social media is a hotbed of dis/misinformation, the traditional news industry has been more than happy to embrace the concept of clickbait headlines and publishing speculation as fact.

You'll recall that I highlighted this instance earlier this week -- where the headline made claims that were subsiquently cast into doubt by the body of the story itself.

This sort of thing is rampant but most people don't notice it because they're not subject experts and, in the past, have simply assumed that if it's published in the news media then it must be true because: "journalism". Today however, the general public has come to realise that more often than not, first-hand reports by people on the scene with phone in hand are often far more reliable and up-to-date than the dross that gets printed in newspapers, broadcast on TV or posted to official news websites.

What's more, with traditional news sources increasingly hiding their "premium" content behind paywalls, people have likely just given up on those publishers as a source of information.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of social media as a news source is that you're likely to get multiple sources all on the same page. Even better, those reports are open to challenge or scrutiny by others which means readers get to draw their own conclusions as to the integrity and validity of what they're reading. Compare this to a traditional news website page -- where *they* are the only source and comments (if allowed) are often heavily moderated.

One has to accept however, that there is still a lot of dis/misinformation on social media, however it is pretty easy to spot these days and most people tend to be willing to adopt a more skeptical mindset when reading something on Facebook or watching a YouTube video from a previously unknown source.

I have to admit that these days whenever a fast-breaking story begins to unfold, I go straight to YouTube. Odds are there'll be a good number of livestreams -- some from news orgainsations but many others by "citizens on the spot" who are using their smartphones to give us a realtime view of the situation. More often than not, there's far more value to be had from the shaky smartphone video than from some professional "journalist" holding a microphone in front of a broadcast camera showing a feed where most of the screen is covered by gaudy branding banners that obscure the very thing we're trying to watch.

In recent years I've written a number of columns predicting the end of the rigidly structured traditional news-gathering and publishing industry as we have known it. I've also predicted that "citizen journalism" is the future of news in an era where every man, woman and child carries a 4K camera in their smartphone and has an entire world just an internet connection away.

And so, it seems, I was right.

Does this mean that the news industry is doomed?

Not if they put their smarty-pants on and apply some lateral thinking to this. I have also said that I have plenty of ideas on how this shift in news reporting could be turned into a highly profitable operation by existing media outlets. I'd love to give it a go myself but don't have the time or the resources. However, if anyone wants to become the next billionaire news baron, drop me a line and we'll talk. Anyone familiar with my 7amNews operations in the late 1990s will know I have a solid track record in reinventing news distribution on the internet.

Carpe Diem folks!

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