Journalism, as a profession and an industry, has undergone constant change in order to conform to our society and its needs. With the invention of the internet in the late twentieth century, the world gained an almost immediate avenue for communication and content-sharing, with this came a new way to engage with news, social media. In the past, journalists were able to almost fully control the dissemination of information, especially in smaller communities where international news was rare and people relied on little more than word of mouth and the daily paper to learn of important events. The modern audience, in contrast, is no longer such a passive consumer. A new generation of readers has grown up in a time when the facts surrounding an event are just a tap away, and the older population is gradually following in their childrens footsteps. This, as well as the immense popularity of social media as a platform to express opinions and engage with content producers, means that journa
lism has been faced with the need to adapt in order to satisfy their readers. With just under fifty percent of all adults plugged into social media (Hermida et al. 815) and sixty-two percent of Americans currently using it to access news-related content (Eckberg et al. 148), this need for change is likely to only get more pressing in the coming years. Facebook in particular has become both a widely popular social media site, as well as an influential model of what features attract and secure users in the modern day. As such, Facebook will have inevitably impacted journalism in a variety of ways, from being an invaluable model for modern journalisms online practices to acting as a distribution point for articles and existing as a public platform for producer-consumer communication. These adaptations have worked to alter the face of journalism for better or worse, and will continue to influence how the modern news consumer and the youth of tomorrow perceive and interact with the news.