Explainer: News cycle in the age of social media

The technologies like smartphones have changed people's lifestyles, mode of communication, and patterns of media consumption in our society. 

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Many of us no longer need to look for news to stay up-to-date. The news instead follows us everywhere. It is at our fingertips all the time.

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We are no longer passive news audiences. We are actively participating in this news cycle. What we do on the internet determines what news we see, hear, and discuss in our society.

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The transformation began more than a decade ago, but we are still learning how to deal with the challenges.

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For example, this photo went viral on Facebook in 2013. It was purported to be a picture of a restaurant named Beijing Snacks in an internationally popular tourist spot near the Forbidden City in China.

The poster on the restaurant’s wall says, “it does not welcome the Japanese, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, or dogs.”

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As you can imagine, some people reacted very strongly and shared the picture on the social media platform.

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Soon, news organisations around the world picked up the news. BBC, Skynews, Agency France Presse (AFP), Channel News Asia, all talked about the restaurant after the photo got widely shared. It even became a diplomatic issue between China and Vietnam.

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This news started with just one picture posted on Facebook and social media users’ reactions to it created the global public discussions that news media outlets could not ignore. 

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This example illustrates how our actions are part of the news cycle now.

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Various studies in different countries have indicated that increasingly people are getting news primarily from the internet. 

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Popular social media platforms in each country often come as the number one news source. It indicates that not only news organisations but also each news audience, in other words, each one of us, also controls the flows of news story selection and distribution.

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What we like, share, comment, tag, and post on our mobile devices all have a strong impact on how we get to know what’s going on in our world. Our actions also affect the computer algorithms on many social media platforms.

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Professional journalists are also getting real time feedback on their stories from the audience on the internet. Our reactions directly and indirectly affect their evaluation of news values of each story and their editorial judgement. 

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We the news audience are all part of setting the agendas for our society now. 

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Just think about how many times during the day we access the internet. 

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What begins with one photo or comment can quickly gain traction and start an important public conversation. It means that each one of us needs to know how to decode whether the information is authentic or not. 

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Our actions are part of the news cycle now. Each one of us needs to be a discerning news audience who does not react or make decisions based on questionable or false news and information.

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Today’s news cycle is also controlled by algorithms. Echo chamber and filter bubbles are two common expressions to describe the phenomenon researchers have observed. 

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[The explainer is based on the lesson the author produced for an online course called Making Sense of the News on Coursera]