Social media has probably never undergone a quicker growth than nowadays, prompting many to believe that this could mark the end of traditional journalism. But I think we are not supposed to be collectively burying it just yet.

Ever since the start of the social media boom of the 2000s, traditional journalism has been on a steady decline.

Several studies have shown the well-documented decrease in the sales of newspapers, a tide that doesn’t seem to be turning any time soon. While some still favour the old-school printed versions of media outlets, we have to accept that they are slowly limping out of our lives. It could lead us to believe that journalism as a whole might be in danger.

The truth is, most companies have already shifted the focus to their online appearance. Websites are easy to update, accessible to the majority of their target audiences, and are considerably quicker than a daily or weekly print.

Besides, they allow for detail. A lot of detail.

Social media is undoubtedly a handy tool – addictive even -, but each platform has its limitations. Instagram is heavily focused on visual and audiovisual content, and leaves no space for links to more detailed explanations. X allows for a meagre 280 characters per post, and has recently imposed a rather peculiar set of censorship rules. Facebook is also proving to be unpopular among the younger generations worldwide.

With websites, you don’t have all that. They are customisable, they have their own format and could fit all the words in existence on their servers if they really wanted to.

News sites are also mostly handled by editors and writers. You cannot create an anonymous account and sneak onto the New York Times with some goofy takes to wait until you go viral – you have to get there somehow. News on websites is typically highly curated, carefully edited and backed up by data, facts or just the opinion of someone who really knows what they are doing.

If you go on social media and try to look for informative content, you are usually in for a rude awakening. Fake sources, AI-generated hypotheses and pictures, or just users with an attitude who really should not have an attitude. There are up-and-coming modern content creators who have proven reliable but the general atmosphere is that of scepticism.

This picture isn’t helped by the algorithms of those apps. More interactions or more radical, eye-catching opinions will naturally be boosted by the app to inflate the numbers, and the element of truth in a post isn’t a requirement for getting views at all. You have to be short, quick and ridiculous (or insanely creative, which we all love).

The cracks on social media’s wall were already visible by a downturn in user interactions on X, and an exodus of news-oriented, neutral sites and users to Bluesky, a similar but slightly more lenient and less money-incentivised platform. We haven’t seen Meta’s apps suffering the same fate, but with Instagram and Facebook both stagnating at best, their last years are hardly a roaring success.

If this tendency of unrest and dissatisfaction continues, we can easily see people flock over to the trusted news pages – either on their website or other online addresses – in the near future.

People want to know what is happening around them – with their favourite celebrities, their hometown, their money or even their favourite brand of coke. If they are curious, they will seek news. And news, even in the 21st century, is still (largely) written by journalists.

Text: Bence Horvath
Image: Generated via Dall-E AI