When
looking at the study done by Pew Research Center, I was shocked to see the
priority list of Topics of News Coverage.
Many of the popular topics in a blog are not at all popular in
traditional press and vice versa.
Some of the most popular topics in
current blogs are politics, foreign events, science and technology. The most popular topics in news coverage are
politics, foreign events, medicine, crime and economy. As you can see the only overlapping topics
are foreign events and politics. Looking
at the graphs at the bottom of the study done by Pew Research Center, topics
also depend on what type of blog or news coverage you are reading or
watching. For example, New York Times
focuses on Business, Economy and other, while Fox News focuses almost all of
their broadcast time on the “other” category.
BBC focuses 69% of their broadcast time on foreign issues. As you can see different stations and blogs
focus their broadcast time on different topics and issues in the world. With this said, depending on which channel of
blog you decide to tune into you will get different topics of information.
With
all of this information provided it has backed up my thoughts about changing of
media information sources. I believe
traditional media sources will become less relevant and online social media
sources will continue to grow and will begin to take over our traditional ways
of getting information. Online social
media will become more accessible and popular because it is more convenient
than buying a newspaper. In my life, I
rarely watch the news or rarely ever pick up a newspaper, but if some type of
media information is many people’s statuses on Facebook, I am the first to know
what is going on. I believe in the
future Facebook and Twitter will become not only communication databases but
also a source of media information. So
for convenience, you will be able to catch up with friends and also check the
daily news on Twitter or Facebook.
This mixture of communication and daily
news will not only be more convenient but will also make many more people aware
of the news coverage happening around the world. In the future, online social media will take
over traditional types of news coverage because of convenience and the want to
go to one website in order to do many things, such as communicate and get the
daily news. Convenience is the overall
want in American technology, which is why social media news coverage will begin
to flourish.
"New Media,
Old Media." The Blogosphere. 23 May 2010. Web. 27 Mar. 2012.
<http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/blogosphere>.
While I do agree that the major reason traditional news media are being replaced with social news media is that when everything is accessible from one device, it is much more convenient, I also believe that there are some properties of traditional media that blogs just cannot replicate. For example, newspaper clippings: sure, you can print out a blog and clip it out, but it does not have the same visceral impact that seeing an aged, yellowed newspaper clipping from a major event in history might have - it removes you somewhat from the experience. And, of course, traditional media have one very important section yet to be effectively replicated in social media news - the comics section.
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