A relentless battle: journalists v.s. influencers
Journalism is a field I’m very proud to be entering. It’s riveting, unpredictable and slightly terrifying while also being incredibly rewarding, educational and powerful to the people. Yet, the diligence of the field is being infiltrated with songs, dancing and Youtube videos created by people who don’t have those same degrees or long hours of credibility. The growing popularity of this way of sharing of information is fueled by the our generation of people that are under the spell of social media.
In today’s age, digital influencers are getting more attention than journalists, which is pretty disheartening to see given that I know what it’s like on the other side. There is a lot of work that aspiring journalists must go through in order to create a credible and successful platform for themselves to make a living and pursue what they love. According to an article from the Forbes by Dan Wallace-Brewster, people on social media can become twice as popular as a journalist with years of experience, in a much shorter amount of time. “The ease with which social media allows someone to become an influencer is far from the path that traditional journalists took to earn authority, including years of training under organizations that were trusted stewards of ethics and standards,” Brewster said.
In order to become a journalist, students must attend at least a four-year college and pursue a degree in the school of communications. This can be any major such as public relations, media studies, even graphic design; however, the best bet is getting a degree in journalism to be succcessful. On top of that, breaking into the news industry is especially hard because the hours can often be long, the pay is lower than many jobs and the field is very competitive. However, for social media influencers, they can have much more regular working hours, larger pay and are often self-employed. Additionally, they don’t have to spend years obtaining a college degree or pursuing internships/local jobs.
According to Bria.com, “...traditional media can be now seen struggling to survive and due to the economic shift in favor of social media.” This shift from journalism to social media, is sometimes called the “social media revolution,” according to The Inquiries Journal. This term highlights the growing shift of the world to a more social media-focused economy and lifestyle. According to the The Inquiries Journal, the author, Ruth Harper doesn’t believe this will kill the journalism industry, but rather it will change it.
Furthermore, as we all know, social media is incredibly addicting, and on top of that, the world’s attention span is also decreasing dramatically. After reading the book Deep Work by Cal Newport and the article “Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It was Stolen”, I learned that the massive obstacle me and the rest of the world face everyday is the “attention crisis”. The attention crisis is the world’s decreasing capacity for attention due to technology and the internet. One of the largest groups that this negatively impacts is journalists because of the long hours they take producing content, especially written, that barely ever get’s looked at for more than a couple seconds. Instead, people would rather get their news or information from a more “fun” tiktok or youtube video that strikes their attention.
Altogether, the social media era is not something that people can expect to disappear in the near future, therefore journalists have adapted in the recent future to make their content more readable for viewers. This means that news organizations are utilizing more social media to promote their content including twitter, facebook, and instagram. Now, both influencers and journalists share information on the same platforms and continue to create content differently for each of their organizations.