Social media and its enormous platform is a tool journalists are now using to publish the news. Social media creates the ability to communicate to others through text, video, pictures, status updates, etc. The ability to communicate to an audience is vital in being a journalist. Therefore, social media has changed the journalism field as a whole. An example of a social media site revolutionizing the world of journalism is Twitter. Twitter has changed journalism by developing a new method to gather news information by crowdsourcing, creating an audience to inform through the convergence to the internet, and allowing journalists to publish and spread news rapidly.
One of Twitter's major advancement to journalism is its impact in the newsroom.
…show more content…
Newspapers and television are still relevant in journalism, however, the amount of people getting news through those sources have declined. A 2008 study demonstrates that 40 percent of those surveyed got most of their international and national news from the internet, this increased from 24 percent in 2007 (Smith, 2014). Additionally, over 52% of Twitter users report that they get regular updates on the news from the popular social media network, this went up from 33% in 2012 (Connor, 2009). Future technologies forecaster Paul Saffo agrees, he states, “Blogging, chat groups and adding comments to online articles are obvious examples, but they are just the beginning. In the TV era, it was hard, if not impossible to participate, but now in the new world of personal media, the exact reverse is the case: it is hard to merely be a bystander” (Saffo, 2012). Twitter has become a common platform in achieving one of the internet’s goal of connecting people to the news. With around 232 million users, journalists have a huge audience to inform (Smith, 2014). Moreover, when breaking news occurs in any part of the world, Twitter users are there to report it almost automatically. When a story is tweeted, depending on the significance, it can spread from user to user very quickly. This is shown when a plane crashed