Should this collaboration continue?

So has imbedding social media within several news broadcasts paid off in hiring ratings? Are journalists wasting their time sifting through a myriad of social networking sites looking for headlines? I would say it is too early to tell for the first question and answer no to the second one. The social networking “trend” no longer seems to be a trend or a phase, but rather a staple that will be imbedded in everyday life for a long time. Therefore, it would only make sense that every type of medium would try to incorporate social media, particularly because of the audience that social media attracts. The latest medium to utilize social media has been the news, who see social media as a last ditch effort to obtain younger viewers. It has been widely reported that print media has suffered do to the ability to read news online, as the graph below clearly illustrates.

A recent study in media tells us that, “over the past five years, the amount of time young people spend reading magazines or newspapers in print in a typical day has declined by seven minutes, from 19 to 12 minutes daily. On the other hand, some young people now spend time reading magazines and newspapers online. In a typical day, 10% of young people report reading magazines or newspapers online, and those who report online reading spend an average of :21 doing so; the average across all young people is two minutes a day.” However, they may be a ray of light. Another study in media management shows us that even though viewership in print media, by the younger generation, has decreased, other forms of news have seen an increase.

So we can conclude that teens and young adults are reading the news, perhaps not in the amount that the media is used to and not in the same way that generations of the past read their news. The fact that many people now turn to reading the news on electronic media may make it difficult to account for the true number of individuals who take advantage of the information the media has to offer. We can tell by the graphs above that there is a slight rise in media viewership and whether this rise in viewership is due to the incorporation of social media within the news industry is too difficult to tell. Social media seems to lead to more and more stories that are relevant to everyday living and in some cases make for a more interesting story. While the youth seems to be completely enraptured Facebook and Twitter, one cannot fault the media for trying to use these buzz words to capture the attention of a generation who could care less about what the media has to say. For now, we’ll have to wait and see if this plan works.

Sources:
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf

http://www.mediamanagementcenter.org/research/fitting.pdf