By Isabella Ying
In the past, you might have found older generations sitting on the porch, coffee in hand, catching up on local or worldly happenings in the most recent edition of the Sunday paper. Nowadays, this sight is rare. Traditional, printed newspapers are pretty much dead among society’s youth.
Notably, Atlanta’s very own Atlanta Journal-Constitution has plans to stop printing cold-turkey on December 31 of this year—one of over 3,200 print newspapers that have vanished since 2005, according to Medill’s Local News Initiative.
Mr. Newman, Lovett’s renowned Newspaper class teacher, tried to explain the phenomenon. “It’s probably part of a long history of, I’m sure when TV came along, the newspaper readership went down, people could wait and watch the news at 6:30,” he said, “or, at the onset of 24-hour News, CNN popped up.”
In more concise terms, according to Ms. Gray, a history teacher: “As innovation happens, the old will become less and less relevant and the new will overtake it.”
Ms. Gray doesn’t see this as a bad thing. She knows that “a lot of people bemoan the death of print news. These innovations happen and you have to adjust.” While she acknowledges that this is because print newspapers have many features that cannot be transferred online, “it’s not really a very profitable thing to do anymore.”
As a matter of fact, Ms. Gray likes how online newspapers “allow the information to be more versatile when you can update an article and your readers can see that an article was just updated at 1:00 PM.” This way, “I know I’m receiving something that’s quite current.”
So while Ms. Gray rarely reads a printed paper anymore, she enjoys the benefits of an online paper.
Ms. Konigsmark, a former journalist-turned-English teacher, recommends podcasts and the radio for information. Ms. Konigsmark listens to National Public Broadcasting, or NPR, every morning as she drives to school.
As for Lovett, the last printed copy of The Lion was the 2020 Valentine’s Day edition.
For the younger generation, an even larger source of information than news sites and podcasts and the radio are short videos that one may arbitrarily come across when scrolling on their favorite social platform.
I have had personal experience with this. Hanging out with a friend one day, we were both scrolling on our phones when an interesting subject emerged. “Did you know that reproduction will be possible without a female egg by 2035?” my friend asked me. I looked at her skeptically.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked. My friend laughed and looked away. “Instagram reels,” she replied.
“You always find this stuff out from social media?” I inquired, incredulous. She nodded, and I laughed.
This inspired some deeper investigation. Is my friend just an outlier, or do other teens get their news from Instagram Reels, too?
Out of 103 students who answered a survey about their social media habits, nearly 73% acquire the majority of their news from social media, with the top three sources being Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
In contrast, only around 45% of them have read an article from a legacy outlet in the past week.
In spite of their news consumption habits, the survey’s results revealed that students are wary of social media news. The majority of the students agreed that it’s not a good thing for students to acquire their news from social media and don’t trust the news they see there.
Freshman Raina Lumpris and Scottie Turner both estimate that they get around 70-80% of their news from social media. Even so, Scottie admits that she doesn’t “trust it as much as I would trust other sources, but I do definitely get most of my information from social media.”
Raina, on the other hand, has more faith in the honesty of humanity. “If I only see something once, then I probably don’t believe it, but if I see it multiple times, then I do,” she says. When a topic particularly interests her, Raina also likes to check The New York Times to fact check or simply learn more about the topic.
Scottie also asks her parents whether or not things are true, but only if she thinks that the topics are relevant.
While Raina and Scottie agree that social media’s presence in the news is growing, they differ in terms of whether it’s beneficial or not.
“In some ways, social media can be more authentic than news sites, because with social media you get sort of the first person basis of how people are thinking about certain events,” Raina thinks. In contrast, “with news sites, it’s more like a professional outlook on the issue”
“The bad thing about it is how people are interpreting it. I think a lot of people are taking it out of context or just looking at certain parts of it and not the whole story,” Scottie thinks.
“Taking it out of context” is indeed a dangerous issue, said Ms. Konigsmark. “There’s literally people sitting in rooms getting paid to decide what your eyes are going to see, and it’s not about what’s the broadest view of the world that we can give this person,” Ms. Konigsmark explained.
Nowadays, “if someone says something, they just report it and they don’t verify it and find out if it’s true or not. The more sensational, the better for clickbait,” Ms. Konigsmark said.
Or, as Ms. Gray put it: “We tend to receive information that confirms what we already think instead of examining and reading different perspectives.”
This means that what you’re seeing on social media isn’t the full picture. It’s especially curated to what will keep you hooked on the algorithm. “It’s all about, ‘how can we manipulate how they feel?’ That’s very different from what any journalist has ever done,” Ms. Konigsmark said.
As a former journalist, Ms. Konigsmark explained how legacy outlets used to train their journalists to verify stories from multiple sources. Nowadays, many sources that work hard to be credible are being disregarded.
Ms. Konigsmark’s concern is that “if we lose it all, there’s no checks on government, there’s no checks on power.” Then, we don’t know everything we need to know to be a well-informed, free member of society.
As a history teacher, making sure that her students are informed so that they can form their own opinions is an important part of Ms. Gray’s job. To her, students can only form their own opinions when they are aware of the biases in the news they consume, and consume news from several different perspectives.
“Teaching students how to synthesize information, analyze information, and come to their own conclusions” is foundational to Ms. Gray’s discipline. However, Ms. Konigsmark thinks that this is becoming less of a priority for kids right now. “There are a lot of attacks on critical thinking right now,” she thinks.
The fact that kids are abandoning reading in favor of social media troubles Ms. Konigsmark. “To…look at a text that you’ve never seen before and figure out what it means is going to be a skill that they’re going to need, and they’re not going to have,” she says.
While she hates to say it, she finds this to be a harsh truth of the present day.
Since social media is so prone to spreading misinformation, Ms. Gray and Ms. Konigsmark both have ways of making sure their students find information from reliable sources. Being a historian, Ms. Gray always tries to go to primary sources for information first.
From her time as a journalist, Ms. Konigsmark has developed a nose for reliable information. First of all, she doesn’t trust a source “if it seems radical, or if it seems outlandish.” She’s also wary of sources when they’re sponsored by a certain group, because, as is common on social media, a lot of people are just trying to gain support for their side.
As for why students are so drawn to social media news? Students who responded to the social media survey primarily enjoy social media’s convenience.
Ms. Konigsmark emphatically dislikes the convenience of social media that appeals to so many. While listening to NPR on her way to school, “I heard a really horrible story about Darfur and what’s going on in Sudan. Does anybody even know that? No. Why? Because all you have to do is go hashtag whatever…and you’re not learning.”
On the other hand, Mr. Newman thinks that students are drawn to social media because “it appeals to you because of an algorithm, and it’s feeding you.” Since Mr. Newman doesn’t have social media, he had to ask me, “Do you feel like you’re fed kind of what you want?”
Yes, Mr. Newman, you are fed what you want. To this, Ms. Konigsmark warns of the algorithm’s dangers. “They are targeting middle school boys with information to make them feel like the world is not fair, and that they should take the world back, and they’re targeting women with stuff to make them feel ugly and not good enough,” she says.
This polarizes the news because “everything that you hear gives you that endorphin boost of supporting your point of view, but in a democracy, I don’t know how useful it is,” Mr. Newman says.
Ms. Konigsmark even fears that it will get to a point when “in order to keep those valid news sources alive, they may have to go nonprofit. We may all have to support them in some way. I think as soon as you get these big corporations involved, then you do worry about manipulation.”
At the end of the day, Mr. Newman, Ms. Konigsmark, and Ms. Gray all can agree that TikToks and Instagram Reels aren’t real journalism. They all recognize the threats of social media to authentic journalism, but they have hope.
“We are going to be navigating this a while, but I have hope that it will be figured out, but it isn’t right now,” Ms. Gray says. With faith in the generations to come, Ms. Konigsmark hopes that, “our kids have some sense that things are being targeted to them and that there’s fake news out there.”
“People have predicted doom and gloom when other big technologies came,” Ms. Konigsmark observed. “But everything kind of reset. We survived… the truth will survive.”
Hopefully, the students currently staying updated through Instagram and TikTok notifications will eventually figure out how to navigate this new world of information and misinformation.
And hey, if you finished this story, congratulations on getting your news about news in old-fashioned news!
