The 24/7 News Cycle

As much as I believe the 24/7 news cycle has left the major­i­ty of online users more informed, I do believe that the amount of infor­ma­tion avail­able on the inter­net has led to an over-sat­u­ra­tion of news. Because of this, I believe the news world has changed for the worst. In the arti­cle From Flash to Fiz­zle, Jim Bankoff, head of Vox Media, said that “our eyes only pop out when a real­ly shiny object comes flow­ing down the riv­er.” This means that because there is so much news and so many arti­cles to view, it now takes a real­ly cap­tur­ing head­line or image for us to pay atten­tion to some­thing. This could mean skip­ping over impor­tant news and sim­ply click­ing on the arti­cle or link that seems to stand out the most to us. The arti­cle also men­tions that we have these viral videos and news sto­ries that burst with pop­u­lar­i­ty for a short amount of time and then fade com­plete­ly after­ward. What if it’s impor­tant for peo­ple to remain aware of these things past the “flash” time frame?

Whether its Buzzfeed,Thought Cat­a­log, or anoth­er online news site, my Face­book and Twit­ter pages are con­stant­ly clogged with shared links and retweets of var­i­ous lifestyle arti­cles that are writ­ten much too sim­i­lar­ly to the next and do not offer any valu­able infor­ma­tion. As said in the arti­cle Twit­ter and the Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing News Cycle, break­ing news reports or a “sim­ple scoop” are not as high­ly val­ued as they have been in the past, and the com­pe­ti­tion among main­stream media caus­es a fight for first place and the lat­est exclusive.

Since I myself write for an online news site, and I do not con­sid­er myself to be extreme­ly cred­i­ble, I have a hard time trust­ing these sites since many dif­fer­ent peo­ple are able to con­tribute their writ­ing. How­ev­er, I do believe that these fre­quent­ly pro­duced arti­cles can help raise aware­ness for cer­tain issues, espe­cial­ly since the writ­ing styles are more casu­al and attrac­tive, par­tic­u­lar­ly to the younger gen­er­a­tion. In my opin­ion, pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists can keep up with these online sites by writ­ing and pro­duc­ing arti­cles that are read­able by a larg­er audi­ence, includ­ing gen­er­a­tion Y.