Final Essay

The internet has changed the way people consume news. Prior to the internet, news was limited to reading a printed paper, listening to a radio broadcast or viewing it on television. However, in our fast past information age, news is supplied constantly to consumers. News consumers have access to stories literally moments after their publication and receive those updates on multiple platforms. These platforms include mobile phones, tablets, email and most importantly, social media (Stassen, 2010). Today’s news consumers live in an interconnected world where information is becoming more critical to everyday life (Stassen, 2010). In 2012 ING conducted a survey among an international group of journalists and public relations professionals. In

In the 2014 ING Group survey, it was discovered that 60% of journalists feel less bound by journalistic rules on social media and that they are more likely to share personal opinion rather than staying objective as with tradition media (ING Group, 2014). If we are to view journalists as the gatekeepers of news, social media is a new key that brings us closer to the content that interests us. Digital media and technologies change the ways the average person interacts with media organization and journalists. Twitter, for example will allow the general public to directly communicate with both journalists and organizations. Upon further examination, you begin to see how something so simple can change the dynamic of the “gatekeeper” model. No longer can newsrooms exercise media control over its audience. Thanks to social features such as retweeting on Twitter, the community now chooses which media it would like to become more visible

Their study on news consumption on Facebook found that users are exposed to a relatively diverse amount of stories. On a regular basis, it was found that roughly half of users where exposed to a minimum of six different areas if topic. The most common of these areas was entertainment. Research found 73% of users on Facebook where regular exposed to this type of content. Which is a stark contrast to the social media website Twitter, where one of the fundamental functions of the website is to distribute information in a new break like format (Monica Anderson,