Social Media

Here are more insights from our CAHSS News conversation with Deputy Opinion Editor and Columnist for the “Washington Post” David Von Drehle and “Wall Street Journal” Live Journalism News Editor Sara Castellanos, ahead of their Estlow and Margolin masterclasses and lectures. 

How do you see the impact of social media on journalism, media and communications and society in general? 

Castellanos: Journalists everywhere are up against the problem of misinformation going viral on a massive scale. I’m going to leave it up to the experts to talk about solutions to that problem, but I do think social media can also be a very valuable tool for a journalist to get the word out about important stories they have published.

Von Drehle: Most human endeavors are good and bad. When we produce a great piece of work that resonates with an audience, it goes around the world in minutes and that’s amazing. Social media can be a powerful reporting tool if you use it correctly, which is not just quoting people on Twitter but connecting with people and use it as a starting point for reporting. 

But social media is a great distractor and tends to amplify the most extreme voices which can push journalists to chase those extreme audiences and occasionally to be extreme ourselves. And it makes people unhappy. Good journalism is an appeal to human community that works from the assumption that there’s stuff that everyone ought to know and that our life together in community is something we all share. But most social media is about taking sides and making the opposite side look as evil, ridiculous or stupid as possible.