What kind of news will be finding you?

If you strongly believe in the social media, the warning may not sound that alarming. Ordinary people have learned to “double-check” or screen real substance from muddled information. That used to be the job of professional reporters, but now a large percentage of Twitter and Facebook users have learned the first journalistic lesson, which is that there is more to everything than meets the eye.

News consumption has drastically changed, and it’s the consumers who have changed far more than the content providers. Nobody who is young enough is paying for news. That leads to last week’s article’s key message: If the consumers are not footing the bills of the reporters, every single one of whom has mouths to feed, then who is?

Someone must have been, the article cautioned. Writers and freelance journalists must be making money from somewhere. Yes, “all news will find you”, but “which stories are thank-yous to previous clients, or concessions to existing ones, or auditions for work they hope to get in the future?”

The warning must have struck a chord with professional journalists. They see an ethical slippery slope if those trained to be objective or investigative or neutral can no longer earn a living by being so. Although the article was specific that “freelance” writers or journalists were the main cause for concern, the warning can be extended to the media industry as a whole. With job security no longer as solid as before, many mainstream journalists face the same ethical temptations, if they have not succumbed to them already.

For quite some time, corporate money has guaranteed the survival of media organisations. It’s only that the importance of their cash is getting more important today. The situation is made more complicated by the embracing of social media by various business firms. The line has started to get blurred between public relations news and news that the public should really know about.

“Advertorials” used to be avoided like the plague in ancient times. Today, if you are a journalist, a writing skill to put smiles on corporate bosses’ faces won’t hurt your career. This is not to mention broadcast journalists, whose line seems even more blurred. Again, you may mourn a dead ideal, or you look at it and see natural selection, no matter how cruel. 

Whether or not journalists and social media can complement each other to resuscitate the dead ideal will answer the question as to what kind of news will be finding you in the near future. Of course, one school of thought insists that there is still no such thing as a free lunch. You either pay the journalists traditionally or you lose something that is harder to measure but is valuable all the same.

The other school foresees order out of the existing social media chaos. When people are “empowered”, naturally it will be messy at first. Rumours and propaganda may first reign supreme, but social media will get smarter and eventually take care of that. Not only will the lunch be “free”, it will also be as good as the “paid” one.

Perhaps which school is correct doesn’t matter much, because the new trend of how content is “valued” has already got going. Journalists – mainstream or freelance – are living in fast-shrinking comfort zones. This is despite the fact that not everyone can, say, get access to Government House or crucial information at police headquarters. After all, how can journalists still expect handsome pay when YouTubers are producing painstaking content for millions to watch for free?

Nothing can change the fact that news will find the audience no matter what. This leaves the question, what kind of news? Whether the question is simply irrelevant or quite important is for us all to find out.