The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content - delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers - social media offers news that is personalized and nimble.
Social media is something of a double-edged sword. At its best, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for marginalized people to speak and bring much needed attention to the issues they face. At its worst, social media also offers 'everyone' an unprecedented opportunity to share in collective outrage without reflection.
You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story."
News in printed form is in secular decline. However, news delivered the way consumers want it is growing and thriving.
On social media, like on Instagram and stuff that I post, and the way that I view myself, and portray myself on there, that's definitely a much more personalized take. I'm not collaborating with people to make that, it's my own social media platform in which I'm - it's not a character, it's just me.
Particularly since the computerization of the world, the impact of media has grown enormously. The printed books and the printed media have become less important. Why should somebody read Laozi or Confucius if he can Google?
I'm going to proportion more time to organizing and taking action and less time to passively consuming news that is dispiriting me. Part of this will be to get off social media. I know social media is just a tool, but we've been using it in a way that has transformed us from a nation into an audience, passively spectating our own ruin.
With the evolution of social media that includes blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, who and how information is delivered has changed tremendously. The landscape for news is a different place, and people have to accept that.
Social media, especially Twitter, has completely changed the fashion and media industries - we now can go direct to consumers in a nanosecond - amazing way of distributing content - right to the point.
Because of social media being such a marketable format, things are constantly being released, so people don't pay as much attention because they have a million things being thrown at them. You reach more people, but now there's more content. Before, it was harder to get the people but there was less content.
Financial news services and other media organizations get press releases 15 minutes before they are distributed to the general public, fueling a furious competition among the news services to rewrite them for their subscribers during their window of exclusivity.
The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
Bridging the virtual world with the physical word is really when social media channels come to life and the magic happens. Because whoever coined the term 'social media' didn't do us any favors. It's not really media. It's more like the telephone, less like the TV.
As social media is less about technology and more about relationship building, we are starting to see more women have a heavy influence if not dominant role in the social media space. It's no wonder that Facebook is being run in part by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
While strides are being made in the social-media space, the newspaper and news business should continue to embrace social media.
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