Organisational constraints✅

Organisational constraints

• People’s habits in the way they keep up with the news have changed, with less use of newspapers (where sales are falling) and TV, and growing use of social media to access and spread news.

• People now expect to be able to access up-to-date news at all times and wherever they happen to be, through their mobile phones, tablets and laptops, or computers at home or work.

• Social networking sites are now increasingly used to release and spread news stories on a global scale, and also to shape the reaction of others to them through commentaries.

• Twitter, for example, has around 316 million monthly active users and sees around 500 million tweets per day, with each tweet using a maximum of just 140 characters to break news, yet a single tweet can result in reports in mainstream news bulletins in a very short time.

• The intensity of news has changed, with news reporting becoming rolling ‘breaking news’, with digital news programmes and websites running constantly changing bulletins all day along.

• These changes place growing organisational pressures on news media, and media organisations have little alternative but to respond to this changed situation, and journalists now often produce material first for the web, rather than for newspapers or TV.

• Competition means news organisations have to work within very tight time schedules to meet ever-shortening deadlines, which means that shortcuts to news gathering may need to be taken.

• There may be greater emphasis on getting a news story first rather than getting in right, with inadequate evidence collected to justify and conclusions drawn. Stories aren’t checked as carefully as they should be, to verify facts and to ensure it is real information rather than speculation.