A few years ago, Donald Trump Tweeted “I love Twitter…it’s like owning your own newspaper—without the losses.” Since Howard Dean in 2004, politicians have been learning to harness the power of social media. Twitter is an increasingly viable tool for circumventing the mainstream media. Rather than depending on a news organization to share the information they think is important, politicians can now use Twitter to create a new kind of sound bite - the Twitter bite.
To know that if you make enough waves or share information that is compelling enough on Twitter, you can catch the attention of mainstream news outlets, you only have to look to Trump’s digital campaign strategy.
That journalists can harness the power of Twitter to engage audiences, share more information with a larger audience and simply don’t do so strikes me as being a sort of uncompromising neglectfulness.
Yes, it’s true that people are always going to need news, but if they aren’t satisfied with what they’re getting from the more mainstream journalistic sources, they can go elsewhere with ease.
Case in point: Paul Horner. His particular brand of ‘news’ is terrifying. It’s terrifying because there are people out there in the world who take him and others of his ilk at face value. He’s making his success on telling people what they want to hear. Of course, the problem with that is, what they want to hear often coincides more with fairy tale than truth.
“I don’t know, Google it” is a phrase I utter to my children at least two or three times a day. When I was growing up, the Internet as a household staple was still fairly far up ahead in the distance. If we wanted information, we took ourselves to the library. Another refrain that often follows “Google it” is “There isn’t any reason not to know, the information is there for you to find.”
Checking your facts is just the smart thing to do.
In the third quarter of 2015, Twitter had a little over 300 million monthly active users. Facebook, by comparison, boasts over a billion monthly active users. by themselves, these numbers seem pretty self-explanatory. But, factor in the embedded Tweets seen elsewhere on the web, and Twitter sees over a billion unique viewers every month.
This upward trajectory is what mainstream journalists should note, and take advantage of. Twitter utilization in the upcoming presidential election has given the medium a jumping off point to assert itself as the go-to site for breaking news coverage and real-time interaction with readers and watchers.
No comments:
Post a Comment