SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — The Twitch streamer or the Instagram influencer may seem like odd ones out among the newspaper writer, the radio speaker, or the TV news producer. But recent studies show that the rise of social media is changing the definition of a journalist.
A Pew Research study released on August 20 looked at how Americans view journalists in the digital age. Most of the respondents agreed that journalists were very important (59%) or somewhat important (31%) to society. But the variety in what people look for in journalists shows how the internet’s impact has changed what a journalist means to consumers.
The study, which surveyed 9,397 people in April, showed that 59% of U.S. adults said someone who primarily conducts their own reporting on current events is a journalist, while only 36% consider someone who compiles other people’s reporting to be a journalist (40% said they were not and 23% said they were not sure).
Greg Munno is the chair of the Magazine, News and Digital Journalism program at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. He said the question of who counts as a journalist has some flaws.
“It’s less of a binary of ‘you either are a journalist or you’re not a journalist,'” Munno said. “There’s kind of degrees of how journalistic you need to be in your orientation to do the job well.”
Newsrooms involve much more roles than that of the traditional, textbook journalist. There’s the social media team, editors of all sorts, publishers, sales teams. These are people who, Munno said, are “mixing a journalistic sensibility … with some more business-side concerns.”
But the digital age has sprouted a new role outside of the mainstream newsroom and proliferated in online platforms such as Substack, YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. You can call them independent journalists, or you can call them news influencers or “newsfluencers.” Often, their output consists less of interviewing and reporting information on their own, but rather of presenting existing reports to a wider audience.
It’s not a far leap from traditional journalists working off of press releases or agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters. So would these influencers count as journalists?
The mere label of “journalist” might not mean much, Munno said, but if their priorities lie in distributing truthful information over their own opinions, their brains are certainly “working in a way that’s journalistic.”
If you are really committed to pursuing truth and getting it right and that’s one of your top priorities more than it is to articulate any specific kind of political viewpoint, if you’re willing to admit when you get it wrong, and to make a correction, if you seek out other people’s opinions and you read broadly and you don’t just rely on a single source, I think you can call yourself a journalist.”
News influencers could be tapping into what audiences seem to value from their journalists: authenticity. The majority of respondents said they wanted honesty, intelligence and authenticity over charisma and popularity. While honesty and intelligence are rooted in accuracy and truth, what “authenticity” meant to the respondents was much more subjective.
Social media allows journalists and their influencer equivalents to feel more relatable to audiences. The presentation is often less polished: no fancy suit or makeup, no three-point lighting or rigid writing styles.
But relatability, a semblance of authenticity, doesn’t necessarily mean more authentic, Munno said.
“When we see something that feels ‘authentic’ to us online,” he said, “we oftentimes fail to appreciate that there’s some performance there, that there’s some curation there, that the personality is trying to appear to us as unvarnished or straight from the heart.”
Regardless, a Pew study from November last year found that 21% of Americans say they regularly get their news from news influencers on social media. Gen-Z adults, ages 18 to 29, are more likely to do so, with 37% saying they get news from influencers.
This somewhat complicates the more recent study, in which the survey pool was mixed over whether the way these types of news influencers work counts as journalism.
It seems, Munno said, that some people expect a high bar of original reporting from journalists, but those same consumers aren’t going to those journalists for news (surprisingly, though, 59% of respondents to the August study, only a slight majority, said they considered people who gather their own original reporting to be journalists).
There are parallels in the influencer question to the bygone discourse over “New Journalism,” as journalist Tom Wolfe dubbed it. New Journalism was a wave of longform journalism in the 1960s and 70s, mostly in magazines such as New York, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, that veered away from the conventional style of rigid, de-personalized reporting and instead read more like short stories that happened to be truthful news.
Readers were bored to tears without understanding why. When they came upon that pale beige tone, it began to signal to them, unconsciously, that a well-known bore was here again, ‘the journalist,’ a pedestrian mind, a phlegmatic spirit, a faded personality, and there was no way to get rid of the pallid little troll, short of ceasing to read.”
Longform magazine reporting is a big stretch from the shortform online content found from most news influencers. But the creative side of social media journalism that emphasizes personality in reporters could contribute something to the field similar to what the New Journalists tried to accomplish.
“Maybe there’s an ecosystem that’s emerging where there’s a place for both the on-the-ground beat reporters and these influencers to collaborate together,” Munno said.
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