Previous generations tended to get their news from network news anchors or the hometown newspaper. Then came cable and the Internet, and the news business still continues to evolve. More and more consumers — especially young people — are now getting their news from Facebook and other social media sites.
How do you get your news?
In the article “How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism,” Ravi Somaiya writes:
Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy.
Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.
Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.
The social media company is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a behemoth that provides access to hundreds of millions of consumers and wields enormous power. About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed.
Though other services, like Twitter and Google News, can also exert a large influence, Facebook is at the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism. Most readers now come to it not through the print editions of newspapers and magazines or their home pages online, but through social media and search engines driven by an algorithm, a mathematical formula that predicts what users might want to read.
Students: Read the entire article, then tell us…
– How do you get your news? What’s your main source: social media like Facebook or Twitter; newspapers or news magazines; or TV news? Or would you say your teachers, family or friends are your most important news source?
– Does your family subscribe to a newspaper or a news magazine at home? Do you ever read it?
– Do you ever watch TV news?
– Do you talk about the news with your family? Do you learn about current events in school?
– How do you decide what news sources to trust?
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