Introduction

The digital age has transformed the way people communicate revolutionarily. Online platforms have been designated to cater for various forms of communication or instantaneous information dissemination, specific to the consumer’s needs. Moreover, the digital age has transformed the meaning and function of journalism. Today, journalists have social media analytics that work out trending topics. This has shifted the definition to covering news of ‘public interest’, considering that social media consumers are the ones that set the agenda of news.

Agenda Setting

For many decades’ journalism played a significant role in history-making, and revolutionising key movements. In either a positive or negative way, journalism has been a major tool in pre-and post-study of significant historical events. A major function of journalism is setting the agenda – deciding on what news is of interest to the public. With the invention of social media agenda setting approach has become debatable. While the definition of news which is of interest to the public has remained the same, which is any news that when known can influence decision-making, the topics are no longer formulated from old-fashioned journalism. 

Borderless Information

Thanks to globalisation, people can access news from all over the globe and beyond. Social media has removed the barriers to access to information. No matter what topic you are interested in and the view you want to engage it in, you will find something about it. However, it is social media that has removed the borders of news strictly provided by media houses. News from media houses have become a regurgitation of press releases equally accessible online. People can subscribe to newsletters of their favourite organisations, as opposed to waiting for a media house to report about it.

Public Interest

Before social media, news publications would usually be categorised by class, region or other demographics which required you to visit other areas if you were interested in niche topics, like mining economies. Now, a topic could trend on X (formerly Twitter) and through people engaging and sharing, news outlets will pursue the story further providing more valuable information. However, caution must be exercised as only thirty-eight million people in South Africa are social media users, which accounts for 68% of the overall population. While this is a significant amount of people, almost 40% of the population’s news interest must still be catered to. User-generated content may assure viewership and allow for further engagement with the topic, however, there is more news outside of social media that merits time.

Social media has truly changed the definition of many concepts: community, culture, communication and now journalism. The audience reach has stretched further than local; the influence is felt far and wide, and people are having inputs about things that happen right by our doorstep yet never have set foot in our countries. How we use social media is the new pacemaker in what is possibly considered newsworthy.