Social media has given rise to a new model for journalism, where audiences have a direct relationship with journalists, influencing their work through feedback while also shaping their own news consumption through curated feeds and algorithms. Previously, interactions between journalists and readers were filtered through an editor and friction. Social media has made these interactions free flowing, now limited only by the platforms themselves.
With the rise of social media, outlets are all but required to meet audiences where they are and publish on those platforms. But this is a precarious position, platforms can cut off access to the audience at any point. Combined with the ad-supported model of journalism on life support, this has forced many publications out of business.
As a result, journalists now depend on audiences not only for feedback but also for financial backing. Readers, used to following journalists whose work they admire, are now explicitly seeking out specific writers, a shift that has been monetised through newsletters and independent, journalist-owned publications.
How Participation is Changing
In his 2023 study, Hendrickx examines NWS (@nws.nws.nws), a youth-oriented Instagram account ran by Flemish public state broadcaster VST.
Launched in 2019, NWS caters to Flemish 13-17 year olds through native social media contentâcontent that is specifically designed for any given platform. At the time of writing, NWS had 360,000 followers. The account has continued to grow since then.
Using interviews with VST journalists and quantitative content analysis, the study examined how news values fit into digital news production, how NWS journalists use them, and which topics appear most frequently in youth news on Instagram via NWS.
NWS posts about five times a day, with an average of three scrollable panels per post in which information is outlined across images and/or videos. This keeps NWS in the Flemish youthâs feed all day, whilst drawing their attention with multi-media stories, helping to maintain NWSâ reach and relevance. This is a stark contrast to media consumption habits of just two decades ago, when news consumption began and ended with watching the evening news or reading that dayâs newspaper.
Of the 105 assessed posts, 31 used both images and videos, with 54 using only images and 20 solely video content, with a âhealthyâ balance of between national, Belgian and international news. News topics include: crime and justice (16.2%), celebrity (15.2%), COVID-19 (13.3%), media & communication, and the environment (12.4% each).
Politics made up just 1.9% of analysed posts, likely due to COVID-19 being classified as a distinct topic. A 2020 survey of 2,500 Flemish secondary school students found that over 60% of young respondents considered political news completely uninteresting, a sentiment echoed by Hendrickx, who denotes a âremarkable absence of (inter)national political newsâ on the account.
At odds with Harcup and OâNeillâs 2017 study on news values, shareability was considered to be an inappropriate selection mechanism. It was rather a desired consequence of NWSâ editorial decisions.
Interviewees from VST stated that thousands of user comments are monitored manually, and the hundreds of direct messages the account receives on a daily basis are all responded to individually. Often young people will have questions about the same topic, which employees say influence editorial decisions on whether or not to make a post about them.
Employees stated that they rarely thought in terms of news values. Instead, they focused on what the main topics of discussion of that day are among the young audience NWS wants to reach. The paper argues the active community behind the account shapes news production choices due to the proximity between the audience and the journalists.
This relationship is considered to be a crucial element in battling disinformation. The journalists feel a moral duty to inform young people, a notoriously difficult group to reach, with trustworthy news tailored to them. Young people have fragmented media consumption habits, and would not yet be aware of VST or itâs reputation.
Direct audience participation demonstrably influences editorial decision-making at NWS more than traditional news values.
âNot worth the scrutinyâ
Since its inception, news had been primarily funded through advertising. Despite recent attempts to diversify revenue through affiliate marketing and paywalls, publications are still beholden to advertisers and the advertising market.
Previously, a publication could rely on circulation revenue to weather spells of low advertising spendingâno longer possible in a world that gets it news digitally. This gives advertisers massive control over what work gets published, lest a whole publication become demonetised.
Jezebel, the iconic feminist outlet, has had hundreds of articles stripped of ads with the articleâs content considered not âbrand-safeâ enough. A week-long, site-wide restriction on ad serving was applied due to âsexual-contentâ.
Words considered non-brand safe include âabortionâ, âtransgenderâ and âracismâ, severely limiting the publicationâs ability to cover such topics.
The publicationâs previous owner, G/O Media, told interim editor-in-chief Lauren Tousignant that âbrand safetyâ, or lack thereof regarding the siteâs output, was âone of the biggestâ factors that led G/O to shut it down. The ad sales team was even asked if it could remove Jezebelâs iconic tagline, âSex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teethâ, from the site.
Update: Tousignant is no longer editor-in-chief, and Jezebelâs iconic tagline has been removed from the site. Jesus Christ, man.
Brand safety aside, digital advertising revenue has been down across the industry, with publishers being the biggest hit among other verticals.
Publishers who simply share links to their articles on social media platforms, rather than creating native content, have been hit by declining viewing figures. Meta, Facebookâs parent company, does not like news. The company has long been accused of sowing seeds of division in society with its News Feed product, where users got served wildly different pieces depending on their inferred interests.
âToday Facebook is interested in cheese, and now a major American newsroom has a cheese verticalâ, says Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. It was a king-maker in the digital news business.
You would post a link on Facebook, it gets boosted by Facebook, you have all these new eyeballs looking at your publication, and an ad too. But this was not an engaged readership, these were viewers who clicked on your article, and then clicked off. The publication made money, but it didnât gain a new, enthusiastic reader.
Then Meta gave up on news, killed the News Feed, and turned off the audience facet. They stopped promoting news whatsoever. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, has resisted calls to allow news publishers to flourish on the companyâs Twitter competitor.
He flatly states Meta company policy on news in reply to Alex Heath, then Deputy Editor at The Verge.
From a platformâs perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (letâs be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.
The perfect storm of declining readership as platforms distance themselves from news, combined with falling ad revenue, has already killed publications. The Messenger, an outlet launched in May 2023, shut its doors just eight months after it started publishing, citing economic headwinds that âhave left many media companies fighting for survivalâ.
Declining impressions of news content on social media and falling ad revenue has left journalists and publications alike to seek out new ways to reach their audience directly. This has given rise to the newsletter, which is not really new at all.
In 2022, 22% of US respondents and 9% of UK respondents said they accessed news via email in the week prior, figures effectively unchanged from 2013 when 22% of US respondents and 7% of UK respondents did the same.
What has changed is a shift in format. Personality-driven email newsletters, with an opinion-style journalism not dissimilar to an essay, have become increasingly popular. Large publications have started offering subscriber-only newsletters from a selection of their writers. For the publication, or the individual writer, the incentive is clear: people are willing to pay for the newsâas long as itâs coming from writers they trust.
Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer, has found great success with the model. Previously Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, Newton founded Platformer in 2020, with an initial 20,000-strong mailing list retained from his previous newsletter with the publication.
By the start of 2024, Platformerâs free subscriber list had reached over 170,000. Newton says that his paid subscribers have allowed him to create new jobs in journalism.
There is a clear appetite from audiences to hear from writers directly, to support people they believe in and give writers the runway to create their best work. Journalists now have the ability to raise funds amongst themselves, from friends and family, form a business which they collectively own, build an authentic relationship with their audiences using social media, and if monetised well enough can do so sustainably.
This is best exemplified in 404 Media, a new tech publication formed of former Motherboard journalists. The publication incentivises readers to pay for a subscription through perks like ad removal, early podcast access, and most notably, âFOIA Forumsââlivestreams where journalists help readers file effective Freedom of Information Act requests. A remarkable offering from a news publication.
The site is profitable; co-founder Samantha Cole, states: âowning our own work, and being beholden to no one but our readers and colleagues â as opposed to say, investors, venture capitalists, or out-of-touch executives â feels like the futureâ.
Social media has enabled previously impossible dynamics between journalists and audiences. But it has also concentrated the power of dissemination in just a few companies, hurting readership and ultimately ad revenue.
As declining ad revenue continues, more publications will fold. Yet with more publications and individual journalists moving toward a reader-funded, reader-centric model, there is reason to believe journalism can become a more sustainable industryâone where neither writer nor reader is disadvantaged.