News Media

There are many different types of media consumers, those who reinforce their bias, those who want neutral news, and those who all out avoid it to name a few. There are also passive and active consumers of news media.

In current times, news has translocated to every media from print to radio. Additionally, they all operate simultaneously. Some news sources even operate across all of these medias. This combination of sources is called convergence. It has its pros and cons, pros being instant publication, anyone can publish, and enables feedback. The cons that come along with these is rushed out news, its hard to get compensation, false news, and troll/harassment that threaten journalists' security.

In the past, you could only receive news from a subscription until radio made it free. For almost a century news has been free, only maintaining some semblance of income from ads. People used to pay for them because they contained so much more detail than a typical broadcast. Newspapers used to have around 50 plus workers but as the income from the business has decreased so to has the staff that's closer to around  12 now. What local papers couldn't do, wire papers did, and continue to do.

Newspapers started to lose ad revenue in the mid 1990s when more and more news started to go online for free. Massive drops occurred in 2007 when smart phones were invented that could access news online. Social media as well began to eat into them when they arrived in 2004 [Facebook] and 2006 [Twitter]. News rooms overall lost 23% of their staff in the past decade. 2018 was first year social media outpaced print newspapers as a source of news.

As journalists got laid off more and more news became more unreliable and it became harder to differentiate real from fake. Fake and partisan news is taking over because they know how to generate clicks. This is because there's no filter, anything can be posted. Traditionalism journalism has filters: editors, verification, everything gets checked. Its a discipline of verification. 

News being reliable is important because:

Informed citizens - are better citizens. 

Watchdog role - Journalists keep an eye on public figures, institutions to expose corruption or undemocratic democracy.

Expose Problems - Expose all sorts of problems so we can fix them, both long term and urgent.

Build Community - Theorists Benedict said news readers are "an imagined community"

Some Issues scholars are working on: Bias that impacts how a lot of news is interpreted, disinformation, local news crisis "vulture owners" fewer staff and resources, news deserts where outlets have shut down, local news declining, representation, media literacy where citizens need a more crucial approach to media consumption, and decontextualization. Craig Silverman, director of Buzzfeed news, was the person who coined the term "fake news". Also, Buzzfeed news department is very good.

North American news is rooted in partisan material. Partisan isn't necessarily fake news, its just biased.