Since the social media became popular in Zambia leading to several online publications getting popular, regular old hard copy newspapers started finding it difficult to keep their popularity.
The obvious argument was, who would be interested in reading the newspapers the next morning when they can access them online?
This is where many established news agencies both print and online made a smart decision and started publishing their newspapers online
Despite this, social media has become massively popular offering established news agencies a good run for their money.
While we are not against this development, we are concerned at the number of journalistic sins that most of these online media commit.
For us journalistic tenets like transparency, objectivity, credibility, impartiality, confidentiality and several standards that guide our profession are the norm; our social media friends have thrown all these considerations to the wind.
Despite the fact that today’s audiences expect to be able to choose what they read, and most believe they should be able to contribute content and opinions too, we are politely cautioning these gullible readers that every profession has dos and don’ts.
On one side, we are hailing the social media revolution in Zambia which fortunately is not the death of journalism as our country has known it.
Instead it is the birth of a democratic movement that emphasises some of journalism’s key factors: transparency, honesty, and giving a voice to everyone.
However, we are worried with the breaking of basic tenets of journalism like objectivity, respect of someone’s integrity and moral considerations like desisting from insults all which abound on social media.
Ironically, the same democratic right for everyone to air their views or start an online media is the source of our concern with what is pertaining on the net.
This has spawned a myriad opinions a bulk of them hinging on kachepa-social gossip. Most online media have become platforms for cyber kachepa-that is more fiction than fact.
Journalistically, giving consumers the ability to publish information more liberally isn’t good news for everyone and is the source of the multiple problems that have emerged from the change.
First, many online media owners together with the number of readers who post their comments are opinion-oriented rather than first-coverage news oriented, meaning most online media don’t offer journalistically reported news content.
Unlike mainstream media, most online stories will probably want to focus on what interests them rather than on what’s important for the public.
This is sad because we expected social media to be the route back to a connection with the audience. And if we use them to listen, we’ll learn how we can add value to our own news agencies by creating a journalism of partnership.
On social media, a writer can get away with sins that would see his counterpart in the mainstream media fired or his new agency sued.
We mean on social media you can also get away with peddling fiction as fact, defamation, leaking sensitive information and furthering political agendas.
The other problem of social media is that phantom writers can express their views on any subject without fear of being taken to task because they are invinsible.
In short, on social media you don’t fear being sued much because you have both no clear physical or visible address to be contacted in case of fabrication of a story.
Fortunately, no matter how entrenched social media becomes, it will never surpass the mainstream news agencies which employ professional journalists.
Just like the telephone didn’t replace the face-to-face meeting , and e-mail didn’t replace the telephone, social media can’t replace other more legitimate forms of informing the people.