Remi Bald Eagle stopping in to give us a shout out.
Posted by Native Sun News Today on Thursday, October 1, 2020
Notes from Indian Country
Social media is killing newspapers
Monday, December 7, 2020
Perhaps the only people reading the printed, paper version of my newspaper, Native Sun News Today, are the elders who still appreciate the value of the printed word. But I think it goes deeper than that. Forty years ago when my first newspaper The Lakota Times appeared on the counters and shelves of the reservation and border town stores, I knew that the one thing most important for the newspaper to succeed was accountability. Whatever story we did had to be backed up by facts. And to this day I believe that newspapers still believe in accountability even though there are those politicians out there who would attempt to diminish their integrity by labeling their stories as “Fake News.”
But all of that changed with the advent of social media, the Internet. And the culmination of this gigantic switch in news was Facebook. In fact the introduction of Facebook and the social media pretty well buried the word “accountability.” As newspaper publishers we knew we could be held liable for the content of our newspapers. We knew we could be faced with lawsuits if we varied from facts and the truth. Not so with the social media. One can say anything about anybody, true or not, on Facebook and not worry about accountability.
Oh, there were newspapers that preceded Facebook that were pretty loose with the truth and their brand of communications soon became known as “Yellow Journalism.” But these were usually fly-by-night tabs that built their reputation on sensationalism. Even their headlines screamed scandalous captions. But every reader knew what they were getting whenever they picked up one of these tabs at the newsstand. They bought these papers for the very scandals they espoused.

We were printing the news our Lakota readers craved. And the mainstream media soon learned what they were missing and began to treat the LNI with the respect it deserved helping to make it one of the biggest and best Native basketball tournaments in America. White high school boys and girls could build a portfolio to send to the athletic managers of colleges they hoped to attend and would often be offered an athletic scholarship based upon their portfolio. The Native boys and girls did not have a platform from which to build their portfolios until we came along and featured them in our news coverage. And so we found that many high school students read our printed newspaper because their schools were often covered in our new reporting. But like all news sources, we had to follow the trend and the Internet was now the main source of news. It became much more convenient to go online to read the news than to go out and buy a newspaper. I attended a National Newspaper Conference in New York City 30 or 40 years ago at which the keynote speaker was Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. So here I was a Lakota man from a small newspaper on an Indian reservation who had enough common sense to know that Bill Gates and his Microsoft would soon spell the death knell of printed newspapers.
I mentioned my concerns to a couple of the big city newspaper editors and they looked at me as if I had just fallen off of the turnip truck. Well, 40 years later I hate to say it, but I told them so.
Ironically, as people get tired of reading their news on the Internet, local and national newspapers are making a comeback. The foundation of our ability to stay in business is advertising and Google and Facebook nearly killed this source of our revenue. It was only the local merchants and tribal governments and schools that kept my newspaper afloat. Social media may be the final nail in our coffin, but until then “Extra, Extra, read all about it.”Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota) is the founder of the Native American Journalists Association and of Indian Country Today. Contact him at najournalist1@gmail.com.
Note: Content © Tim Giago
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