How Social media is reshaping the news

Social media and the use of social media has changed and in some ways revolutionised how certain industries work. This can definitely be said for the news industry which has nearly been turned on its head since the advent of social media. The sales of broadsheet newspapers has dropped dramatically in the past few years with more and more people turning to apps on there smartphones and tablets to read or watch the news of the day. One of the main online driving forces for news telling has to be Facebook. Most news companies have a Facebook page where they can upload articles which can be read by their whole audience simultaneously. Facebook is also a great place for a news company to expand it's readership figures, in the US over 64% of adults are on Facebook which is a huge number and the opportunities present for enticing new readers is in plentiful of supply.

Twitter is also an extremely useful resource for news-cooperation's . Twitter has for some become there main source of news and more and more people are turning to it as a resource. There are a few good reasons for this. On Twitter you can follow both the newspaper and the journalists and receive updates on the news from both sources, This was almost unheard of in the not so distant past and has given people much better access to news and news stories then ever before.

  And its not just access to the news that social media has given people but it's also the ability to comment on the news. Now we have always been able to share our thoughts on a news item but it was a rather longer process then how we do so today. If you read something in a newspaper that stirred a reaction in you say twenty years ago, you would send a letter to the editor and if you were lucky it may get published for all to see. These days social media users can read a piece on Facebook or Twitter and they can immediately share a comment on it and publish it for the world to see. Now this is both a good thing and a bad thing as things can be said or in this case typed in the heat of the moment and immediately published for the world to see. Of course the author of the comment may later regret there words but at that stage its already too late, even if you delete potentially thousands of people have already seen it. So caution is needed when commenting online.
   

Social media is also reshaping how people discover news. A lot of people, young people in particular, simply dont buy newspapers any more, and in a age where knowing the news is quite possibly more important then ever it's good to know that there are a vast array of news publications now available online and that news is shared online so widely by so many different mediums its quite hard not to be kept in the loop when it comes to news.

So thats just a few way's of how social media is reshaping the news, Thanks for reading!

References:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/

  http://www.economist.com/ideasarena/news/by-invitation/questions/will-rise-social-media-fundamentally-reshape-news-industry-o