Che fine ha fatto il Quarto Potere? La relazione asimmetrica tra giornalismo e social media = What’s happened to Fourth Estate? The asymmetrical relationship between journalism and social media

Abstract

According to Reuters Institute, two trends dominated the online news ecosystem: the consumption of the news increasingly take place on mobile devices; on their smartphones people get in touch with news mostly through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social media. That raises some important issues because traditional publishers are losing the control on the distribution of their online contents: already weakened from the collapse of the advertising market, the news industry doesn’t seem to be able to reach a very large audience on mobile devices without the help of social media. But on these platforms what the audience can read, how citizens are reached by the news, is a matter of algorithms owned by tech-companies whose aims don’t include to ensure a thorough, unbiased, correct information to the people