Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Business Wire’s 2015 Media Survey is now available and it offers startling results about how journalists see the future of news media. The landscape of media is changing – new platforms and new styles. The New York Times is an institution but it didn’t start off as one. How will we be referring to BuzzFeed decades from now? Will the two seemingly different lines of media style intersect at some point in the future? These questions are part of the debate regarding the future of media and journalists are split.

According to an article published in The Guardian back in 2013, BuzzFeed is described as an, “irreverent US news and entertainment website taking the social web by storm” and investor Kazz Lazerow, co-founder of Buddy Media, described the website as “the defining media company for the social age.”

Only a few years ago, BuzzFeed represented the wave of change the digital age brought upon news media and that wave has only continued to grow. Now, BuzzFeed is challenging traditional forms of news, jockeying to become the standard of journalism.

When asked to decide between The New York Times style and the BuzzFeed style, journalists made clear that while the classical form isn’t going anywhere, it will have to share its place at the top....

For a Delacorte Lecture I gave in 2012, I described what I viewed as a headlong rush toward digital self-destruction in the publishing and journalism world.In some ways, things have only gotten worse. It is a frightening sign of the times that, to save money, New York magazine, an iconic weekly, has gone biweekly, and Ladies’ Home Journal, a monthly founded in 1883, has switched to quarterly publication. I am even more disturbed to learn that my old college paper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, wants to go to weekly publication and devote more energy to its so-called digital focus. Google continues its scorched-earth march through copyright territories once controlled by publishers and writers, while Amazon puts more bookstores out of business and buys The Washington Post. And then there’s the very well reported story in the March/April issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, “Who cares if it’s true?”

In the last few weeks the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the Ukrainian crisis and the situation in the Gaza Strip are monopolizing media attention....

Last Wednesday the Twitter account of the Associated Press posted this tweet:

The news was verified, the tweet was not wrong from a grammatical point of view, however there was an ambiguity whereby if the word 'crash' is read as a part of the verb 'crashland' rather than as a noun, the meaning becomes the plane which was carrying the bodies of the passengers of the MH17 had crashed. A little later, the account   clarified the misunderstanding, but the damage was done with the tweet wrongly interpreted and already shared by thousands of people,   sparking the most varied reactions.

The episode has prompted Megan Garber of The Atlantic to write a piece about the use of "breaking news" designation. According to Garber, it was not a necessary piece of news to add to many others re-launched as indispensable 'breaking news' (a plane has landed, after all: it is news in an article, in a context, but not breaking news itself). It is useless to engulf the news ecosystem. "The term 'breaking' is quickly losing its meaning," Garber explains, in agreement with what Felix Salmon stated during the last edition of the International Journalism Festival....

The New York Times has said it is planning to shut down or absorb as many as half of its existing blogs, with the hope that those skills can become more widespread inside the newspaper as a whole — but will they?