➢ Many of today’s newsrooms not only use technology extensively but also rely on

technology to function. This influx allows journalists to perform functions

“simultaneously easier and harder.” Technology changed the job, fundamentally, but it
also changed the role of the audience. Now, not only is the audience active, but
members have also gained slight power over the news agenda. This change in the
audience’s role has led to some tension concerning journalists and autonomy. The main
reason for this tension comes from the advent of social media.
➢ Studies of the journalism industry’s use of social media illustrates three main ways in
which it affects news production. The first is the audience’s relatively newfound power
to judge quality through dissemination. Through social media, audiences can decide
which stories they find most important and share those. News organizations now focus
on how often their stories receive shares on social media, going so far as to capture this
with analytics.
➢ Second, social media affect journalistic routines through the adoption of crowdsourcing,
which is the process of obtaining sources, story ideas or general information about a
topic. Typically, a journalist might use crowdsourcing to more quickly and efficiently
ascertain how the public feels about a situation.
➢ Finally, the audience can enter the journalist’s network by using social media’s various
feedback mechanisms. Research shows that the more “likes” a story receives on
Facebook or if a story topic trends on Twitter, journalistic organizations are far more
likely to follow-up on the story; thus, “audiences have become important influences in
tailoring content.”
➢ Journalists integrate social media into their news work routines in different ways, but
they have become a vital tool. Journalists frequently use Twitter and Facebook as a
means of promoting their work, thus hoping for more “likes” and affecting the potential
for trending; journalists also use social media to build their personal brand. The process
journalists go through when they adopt new technology, such as social media, and
incorporate it into their routines is called normalization. But normalization revolves
around the preconception that these technologies are used to augment old routines.
However, social media do, in some cases, also force journalists to abandon old routines
and start new ones. And once again, this change has affected journalists, as they believe
new routines lessen autonomy. Journalists have always valued autonomy, and social
media allow for more open participation and, thus, creates more of a struggle between
a logic of open participation and professional control. Social media, in essence, became
something journalists use to help report and tell stories, and also something that shapes
how journalists do their jobs.