How Social Media is gradually swallowing Journalism ~ Olajuwon Obalola

Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world.

The Internet and the social web enable journalists to do powerful work, whilst at the same time contributing towards making publishing journalism an uneconomic venture.

What has happened to journalism in the past five years through the impact of social media, has been as big an upheaval as what happened in the previous fifteen, when we thought there could be no greater change than the arrival of the widely available web.

Two significant things have already happened which we have not paid enough attention to:

Firstly, news publishers have lost control over distribution.

It has moved away to social media and platform companies that publishers could not have built even had they wanted to. It is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business has been embracing this, and ‘digital native’ entrants such as The Nation Newspaper, Punch Newspaper, and TVC and Channels TV, have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.

Secondly, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.

The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetised.

There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect, than there ever has been in the past. Networks favour economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing.

Let me expand on these points and describe why this shift has happened so quickly.

The mobile revolution is behind much of this.

Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded. In Nigeria, the amount of time we spend online has doubled in a decade, up to 20 hours a week, up from 10 hours in 2005. At its peak we watched 24 hours a week of television, when there was little or no other visual electronic entertainment.

Two years ago the time we spent looking at our phones, and the time we spent on desktop browsers in Nigeria, was roughly 50/50, two years later, it is 60/40 in favour of mobile. This is really significant, as the design of our phones, and their capabilities (thank you Apple), favour apps, which foster different behaviour . Google did recent research through its Android platform that showed whilst we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, the usual power laws apply, and we only use four or five of those apps EVERY day, and of those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of that time is spent in a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform.

In America this is even more pronounced than here. The majority of US adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.

As the time spent within apps increases, we see new paths emerging for news delivery both within social apps and sometimes from external sources. Every morning, for instance, at the moment, a news bot sends links through my Facebook Messenger account which I respond to. Financial site Quartz has made a news app which apes a messaging app. In this respect the future is already here. Facebook, which owns WhatsApp and Messenger, has a significant stake in this too.

To recap:

1.People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.

2. It is mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter.

3. The competition to be one of those apps is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.

Journalism and the delivery of news has become an important part of this battle for attention on mobile, people are curious about what is going on in the world right now, the sports scores, the weather, what their friends have been doing and how Donald Trump fared on Super Tuesday.

Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves.

A wonderful friend of mine in journalism world said "Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years, than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred.

We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability — virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging and chat apps — and massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many".

Is Social Media gradually swallowing Journalism?