How Social Media Offers Opportunities for Growth in the Traditional Media Industry

Abstract

Under threat from social media and interactive Web 2.0, the traditional media industry seeks new models to maintain its viability. This chapter studies both consumers and prospective producers of one genre—travel journalism—to advocate a model that could help arrest the industry's decline and return to growth. It argues that one way forward for traditional media would be a new model of curatorship, in which a professional journalist collaborates with amateur contributors. It suggests that such a hybrid arrangement will be recognisable neither as professional newsroom nor as amateur social media, but a new model with features of both. This offers a way forward so that rather than contributing to the declining fortunes of the traditional media industry, as many journalists fear, social media can instead encourage progress.