Back in March of 2007, an article surfaced titled, “Journalism Is Not Dead, But Newspapers Are Dying.” In 2007, the year that debuted the first generation iPhone, the digital transformation was well on its way, though not nearly as advanced as it is today. Even so, predicting the slow death of newspapers was not a stretch: “We live in incredible times. Everything around us is changing with frightening diligence. So, where’s the adaptation and desire to keep up with consumers? Are journalists at fault? No, it’s the businesses in which they work and the institutions where the were trained.” The article ends on a more positive note, assessing the need to accept adapt to the technological advances rather than sitting in denial. After all, traditional journalism may be dying, but this does not mean reporting and the news itself has to die with it.

A more current 2016 article by Dale Maharidge of Moyers and Company, “What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?” Assesses the effect of the technological advances on today’s news outlets, and the danger that presents itself when the industry does not adequately provide for journalists to adapt to this new environment. Newsrooms are disappearing, and veteran reporters are being forced from their profession more than ever before. The term “seismic shift” is overused, but it explains what is happening to American newspapers. In 2007, the year the aforementioned article was released, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at 14,000 daily papers. 2015 saw 32,9000 journalists, according to a census from Florida International University by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In the Fall of 2015, the newsworld saw an increase of buyouts and layoffs at outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Daily News, among others, and weeklies and magazines like National Geographic. Traditionally, journalists had a sense of career stability because newspapers were always in demand, and newsrooms were stocked with passionate reporters and editors, such papers like the Sacramento Bee bragged to new hires in the 1980s that even during the Great Depression, the paper had never laid off journalists.

Another article from Western Journalism sheds some more light on this heavy subject: “USA Today is working to align its staffing levels to meet current market conditions … The actions taken today will allow USA Today to reinvest in the business to ensure the continued success of its digital transformation.” Apparently, shareholders are tired of subsidizing the high salaries of big-name journalists that people are reading less and less. The media industry is attempting to deal with the fact that only the older generations still read the newspaper, listen to news and talk radio, or even watch the nightly news; this of course excludes millennials, who consider news old after it has been online for 12 hours, where it has been recycled, regurgitated and often re-framed throughout social media platforms before it can even reach the newsroom for printing. Given, TV news has a shorter cycle, but millennials are too busy with their smartphones to even consistently watch news on the television. Why bother turning on the news channels at around 5:00 every afternoon when they already came across all the breaking stories on their own time? Consequently, today’s journalist is recognized by the number of clicks, shares, and comments he generates; without the page views, he is unemployed.

The role of millennials 

A piece posted on LinkedIn focuses on the future role of millennials in the news media. Will millennials grow up and go back to the “old habits” of watching cable, reading newspapers, and subscribing to magazines after their eyes have been far too damaged from years of looking at small bright screens? In the meantime, millennials are not reverting, which hurts news outlets and forces them to try to get millennials to “click here.” Even the content of the news is hurting, for example reporting on every meaningless tweet Donald Trump posts, which even he pointed out: “I do a tweet on something, something not even significant, and they break into their news within seconds.”

The LinkedIn article observes this as painting “A somewhat bleak future for journalistic media …What we have increasingly seen is news being produced by companies outside of journalism, and independent news being replaced by self-interested commercialism.”

Is journalistic independence even viable anymore? LinkedIn believes the current habits are compromising the integrity of journalism and blurring the line between what is considered “newsworthy.” Even so, trustworthy, respectable sources will not become obsolete: “The role of professional journalists is not only to inform us of what’s happening, but also to interpret, dissect, and translate events in a way that we can understand them. They give historical context, background, and connect events to paint a picture that a trending hashtag on Twitter probably does not.”

True journalism can be defined by its long history of evolving and adapting based on the needs of the people and the ever-changing tools that are available. The article affirms: “[Journalism] evolved with the invention of the printing press, which made printed news books, periodicals, and eventually newspapers possible. The creation of the telegraph forced it to change again, and enabled news reporting as never seen before. Contemporary inventions have always forced journalism to change and evolve, and the internet is nothing more than another one of those inventions.”

Social style

With that said, a change in journalistic style was inevitable, perhaps millennials will grow out of the comfort of their iPhones and reach for more “mature” news sources, but then again maybe they will not. For years, researchers and social critics have worried that the newest generation of Americans is less interested in news than those who grew up in the pre-digital age. Data that backs up these concerns suggest adults age 18-34, “Do not visit news sites, read print newspapers, watch television news, or seek out news in great numbers,” according to The Media Insight Project. Millennials spend so much time on social media, establishing concern that millennials’ understanding and awareness of the world has been narrowed by their incidental and random discovery of news coverage passing through their social feeds. A 2015 study that looks closely at how millennials learn about the world through their devices, and social media platforms determined a relieving consensus that these beliefs are not completely true.

The data suggest that social networks are exposing millennials to more news than they were initially seeking. The study also showed just 47 percent of millennials on Facebook say that getting news is their main motivation for using the app, but it is still one of the significant ways they discover the news. Eighty-eight percent of millennials surveyed get news from Facebook regularly, and more than half of those do so daily. In addition to Facebook, the study showed other social media platforms where millennials consistently get their news from including YouTube at 83 percent, Instagram at 50 percent. The study points out people have always “discovered” the news in part by accident, through word-of-mouth, or incidentally coming across it while watching TV, listening to the radio, and then finally purposely seeking others sources to learn more.

With the recent influence of Facebook on the media and all other aspects of reporting, it is fair to ask, will Facebook become a platform for not only breaking and circulating news, but for longer-form content as well?

In any case, journalism is undoubtedly not what it used to be. Before knocking it as “dead,” however, it is important to acknowledge the changing world and technological advances and those who are willing to work with news outlets in order to keep up with the developments in order to preserve the good historical name that is journalism. Staying in touch and keeping up with the world is an important part of any millennial’s life, and there are great promises for the future of journalism and the rapidly progressing world of reporting.

Photo via Facebook Newsroom