Why do journalists and social networks need to work with each other?

Despite how essential social media has been to bringing journalism to the modern age, the two have never really worked together and the systems that they have now is haphazard cooperation that has given birth to numerous challenges. The only way to fix this is for journalists and social networks to actually work together in an organized fashion.

As we’ve described here a number of times, one of the biggest disruptions in the media industry has been on the distribution end — the actual creation of journalism and other content has also changed, but even more important is the shift from media outlets controlling the channel (newspaper, magazine, TV network) to relying on outside platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google for distribution and attention. That has brought with it a host of challenges, including ethical ones around how free speech and freedom of the press are handled by social networks that have no journalistic motivations or constraints whatsoever.