The Impact of Social Media upon the Herald Sun Newspaper in Australia

Title: The impact of social media upon the Herald Sun Newspaper in Australia

Serial Number：MEB628

Student ID Number：28372689

Class: AMJ

The recent technological developments of social media has changed the way people interact in Australia. According to Dreyer (2012) and Nielsen (2014), social media is being used by the online population which accounts for approximately 1.2 billion people around the world, and almost more than 60% of them connect with it at least once a day. With greater access to the internet, especially through smart phones, the growth of journalism will be driven over the coming years, as explored in news report. This essay argues the positive impacts of social media on The Herald Sun newspaper by analyzing McLuhan’s Tetrad, which is focus on McLuhan’s theory of “laws of media”: How does one specific media enhance, retrieve, obsolescence and reverse another sector. (Levinson, 1999). In particular, social media can  enhance the speed of news delivery, retrieve the idea of providing a community for people to communicate with others, obsolescence the traditional news vendors, and also may suffer from reverse network effects. Levinson (1999) also claims that the purpose of McLuhan’s Tetrad is to help people to be aware of the influences of media better through consciousness or awareness, and to enable them to take part in the future medium changes.

Social media is internet-mediated technologies that involve social interaction in virtual communities and networks. (Rice & Haynes, 2016). It is important that the audience as a user of social media could engage with content actively rather than just simply browsing it. There are a few digital media platforms are the dominant websites in the digital market, like Twitter, which provides shorter words content updates in order to target the younger audience. Facebook, which belongs to social networking that connected with other people based on similar interests, and to interact with other users in different kind of ways. Youtube, the ubiquitous media sharing platform enables sharing and uploading videos by youtubers. These frequently used platforms in the 21st century not only enable users to share information and collaborate with each other, but also generate content by themselves. In recent years, most Australian newspapers have been updated to experiment with multiple online channels due to this trend in the growing popularity of social networking.

As Social media grows larger, it has become a necessary part of daily life for most  millennials with experiment of popular online news websites (Yuksel et all., 2016). Therefore, it is inevitable that some significant benefits of social media have been shown on The Herald Sun newspaper, which is an Australian morning tabloid newspaper that have been merged in 1990 from two newspapers owned by The Herald and Weekly Times Limited. According to Davidson (2015), The Herald Sun newspaper has strong, engaged audience that every weekday, about 1.4 million Victorians would read The Herald Sun newspaper. Now with the development of social media, this newspaper company provides multi-online platforms for people to interact with others. According to McLuhan (1964), “The medium is the message”. Social media enhances the speed of news delivery, and contain video, audio files of the content. They increase the potential services of the newspaper and they reinforce cooperation and publicity (Euchner, 2016). Besides, social media retrieves the idea of providing a community for people to communicate with others. Social media provides The Herald Sun a platform (online news website) for people to engage with mainstream policy and media discussion. (McCallum, et., 2016). It is different from print media, readers in the past who could only viewing the content passively, but now they have free access to express their own opinions and compare them with other people’s values. The editorial pages create a new experience that enables people to highlight or screenshot the content and conserve the online pages in their own devices. In addition, social media obsolescence the traditional news vendors, so the content on the newspaper will not be missing when it is rainy or snowy that the drop of water may ruin the newspaper.  The readers will not be waiting for the newspapers from news vendors’ delivery and find out the news that actually happened yesterday, but with social media, they will get to know the latest news through Twitter or Facebook instantly. These positive impacts that social media bring to The Herald Sun newspaper has already changed the way that journalism and Australian general public present and perceive news in the present day.