OK, so social media has changed our perception of news. We want it now, in a click, without always checking our resources. People laugh quickly at new finds and spread the links to their friends. And before you know it, things have gone viral.
Insignificant stories not worth mentioning have reached international heights, instead of just filling the minutes on the local news broadcasts. Fires, crashed cars, collapsing bridges seem to have taken over the 5 o'clock broadcasts, along with J. Doe's personal pictures of his vacation and other mundane events he may come across in his ordinary yet extraordinary life.
Have budget cuts affected the media so greatly? Or is it about saluting and recognizing faithful viewers. In any case, it seems all very 'un-newsworthy' so much of the time.
An extreme example of what we saw this summer were stories - at least one in particular - that deserved to go completely unnoticed. A radical "thinker" Terry Jones, with his 'following' of 50, made international news and once again made America look like a band of crazed reactionaries, which is not entirely true, if truth be told.Why pay attention to this loon? Why give him a free voice and the credibility of serious news coverage? I don't get it. Not when there are so many other deserving messages to get out there. I was tempted to drum up some kind of anti-Jones story. I wonder if burning 51 dunce caps in my garden would have drawn media attention?
Social media is all about ground-up communication, compared to the top-down form we'd had no choice but to accept pre-web 2.0. But who holds the reins? Should media institutions relinquish their authority to popularism? What was the value in this story? The only value was the controversy that was created by covering this story. And is that the new role of journalists - to incite emotions and negative feelings between groups of people? I still don't get it.
Read the NY Times account here.
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