Young People and the Media

Learn how young people are interacting with and changing traditional media culture

Posted on March 26, 2018 in Review of the Week

Young people and the future of news: social media and the rise of connective journalism

Clark, Lynn Schofield. by Lynn Schofield Clark and Regina Marchi Cambridge, 2017
305p bibl index, 9781107190603 $99.00, 9781316640722 $24.99, 9781108122153 $20.00

Schofield Clark (Univ. of Denver) and Marchi (Rutgers) dissect the millennial reaction to traditional news. Starting with an incident in which the radical Westboro Baptist Church was confronted by an ad hoc group of student counter-protesters, the authors explore the complicated ways in which audiences ingest traditional news through transformative tools such as apps, social media, and chat functions. They arrive not only at reevaluations of how today’s users see news but also suggest that news (as previously conceived) itself is changing, citizen journalism is arriving, and redefinitions of media are transforming public agendas. The authors report on the intersection of news, technologies, and communities in the construction of a new form of “relational processes and practices” that constitute an interpersonal approach to mass communication. They see this as crafting a new age of connective journalism based on information sharing and democratic ideals. They report that youth are more likely to share journalism in private feeds, not public forums. Citizen activism is prompted by a legacy journalism devoted to the famous and doubly processed by comedy surrogates (SNL, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show). Finally, this legacy media rarely tells the millennial story.

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: S. Lenig, Columbia State Community College
Recommendation: Recommended
Subject: Humanities – Communication
Choice Issue: Apr 2018

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