Personally I do not keep up to date with the news very often
and mainly discover news stories unintentionally through family and friends or on
the internet.
However when I do find news the majority of it is online, particularly
on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where news organisations
share links to their homepages. These news organisations do this in order to
get an audience to visit their websites. Often a lot of these news stories were
found on my timelines because they were shared by friends or a sponsored articles,
rather than because I follow the new homepages themselves. I believe many of
these sources are not trustworthy however as they often use clickbait in order
to catch the reader’s attention and get them to visit their websites, often the
story does not have much correlation to the title. This is why I no longer
click on the news stories and I only tend to read the headline as I cannot
trust whether the article is real and whether the article is addressing issues I
want to read about. Plus these news stories can often direct you to news
organisations which are unknown of so might not be reliable as they are unheard
of so don’t owe the audience facts. Despite this if I am more inclined to read
into the story if it’s from successful well known organisations, such as BBC
News.
Often I discover breaking news stories by my family and
friends talking about them. For example I found out about the recent London
terror attack on the tube within school as everyone was talking about it.
However different people gave me different facts therefore I wasn’t able to
trust the sources. This is why I took it among myself to go on twitter to read
more, it was trending at number one so I spent time reading tweets from
different people and organisations to find out as much as possible about the
situation.
If there is a particular news story which is significant and
important then I will watch the news on the TV to educate myself what is
happening. This is because news stations have to give you the correct
information and give you all the knowledge that is known.
I believe media has become extremely accessible and almost impossible to avoid as it is everywhere around us. Despite this the majority of news is overlooked as we have got used to ignoring the response articles on Facebook and click past the news stations. This is because we wanted news tailored to us, so when we do discover something that interests us we take it upon ourselves to research into further using social media or google rather than reading an entire newspaper to find out none of the stories where particularly important.
We were asked to download and trial the BBC News app, surprisingly
I found it very useful as I learnt a lot about what was happening around the world
in a short space of time. The app
allowed me to filter the news stories down to areas that interested me, I believe
this is an extremely useful function as it meant I didn’t have to waste time
scrolling to find one intriguing story out of every dozen as the stories where
preselected for me. I also found the news alert function useful as it meant I kept
update with what was happening in the world constantly whereas before I relied
on others to tell me key news.
An interesting read, Emily. Your position seems to be as a slightly reluctant consumer of news! It's good that you are aware of clickbait style news headlines and are critical about the sources you are presented with. We live in an age of information overload and the key skills are to be able to navigate and evaluate the information that appears in our various feeds.
ReplyDeleteA few things worth thinking about: what role do you think quality news journalism or reporting has and what does it contribute towards society? And do you think the big tech giants such as Facebook and Google have a responsibility to ensure the information of their sites is correct?
With your use of the BBC News App perhaps you touch on both a positive and negative; the ability to filter.