For the last two years, the Spanish town of Jun has been sneaking into pages of international press for abandoning local bureaucracy and running a civic government on social media, particularly on Twitter. In doing so, Jun has adopted e-governance on a scale that is obviously a positive way forward in cutting the red tape and simplifying access to the administration.

The impact of social media on mainstream news media is no less significant, though it would be hyperbolic to suggest that it would replace newsrooms and news professionals. Yet thousands of miles from Jun, even a cursory look at news lists and news ‘events’ in Indian newspapers, portals or channels on any given day would reveal that social media is setting the agenda for a sizeable section of the news industry.

Tweets as news

So, when a week starts on a ‘newsy’ morning note of playback singer Sonu Nigam ruffling politically-correct feathers with a tweet that complained against loudspeakers blaring azaan, the evening had to be spent debating the seminal implications of the 140 characters statement. If that’s not enough, what can still generate news is how the social media is itself reacting to that news. So, The Hindustan Times finds it newsworthy to inform you that Twitter users in film industry are ‘divided on Sonu Nigam’s tweets about azaan’. Its rival and the market leader The Times of India couldn’t resist having an edit on the tweet, while on the same page Jug Suraiya was lamenting how social media has ‘become antisocial media’.

While news media is dealing with this easily available news-storm, there are other minor storms. News pages and portals kept you posted on how twitterati slammed Donald Trump for forgetting to place his hand over the heart during national anthem or, for that matter, how Sunil Grover replied to Rishi Kapoor’s efforts to broker a Twitter patch-up between Grover and Kapil Sharma. There was also the information that Virendra Sehwag is winning it with his wacky birthday wish to Muttiah Muralitharan. All that, obviously, is incomplete without updates about one-upmanship of ‘epic replies’.

Sometimes the campaign against the abusive type of trolling in social media space, which includes personal attacks and vilification campaigns, occupy special features space in the mainstream news media — as does the ‘Let’s talk about trolls’ series in The Hindustan Times. Such acts have elements of criminality — justifiably newsworthy to be reported. This was evident this week when former TV journalist and Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader Shazia Ilmi filed an FIR against supporters of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for posting obscene comments against her on social media.

However, journalists who revel in digging past tweets for news stories and turn trolls themselves in their attack on some inconvenient utterances of politicians and celebrities, aren’t so averse to launching personal attacks on people who question them.

To not go any further than this week, a case in point is an exchange of tweets involving television journalist Barkha Dutt. This week she is being trolled for her media venture partner Noman Siddiqui’s tweets of 2013 in which he had asked for Narendra Modi’s hanging and equated him with Libyan dictator Gaddafi. What’s, however, obvious is that while ridiculing the troll for being unemployed enough to dig old tweets and not placing it in the right context, Dutt won’t herself have missed this detail if she had to target Siddiqui in any of her shows or newspaper pieces, or wait, even on her Twitter handle.

Indeed, just last month, she was busy excavating what Uttar Pradesh Chief Yogi Adityanath had said, not bothering to check what he really meant. Careful interpretation is a privilege that she expects the troll to give Siddiqui exclusively.

There is also a sense of hierarchy of their professional standing that some journalists derive from their popularity on social networking sites. It’s often expressed with cold logic of the number of followers. They are deluded with the idea of believing in their own cult. Some of them even start to set their terms of engagement with their colleagues in media space with the same pecking order.

That’s what occurred when Tavleen Singh refused to engage Mihir Sharma in a Twitter conversation saying, “You have too few followers for me to continue this conversation. Nini time Mihir’. Since then, Mihir has grown on Twitter to have 125k followers while the Tavleen has grown more to have 249k.

The fact that social media has emerged as a powerful space for democratising public communication and social presence is something that even political parties, governments and civil society have taken serious note of. There are processes hinting at emerging times of Twitter diplomacy and social media governance. Mainstream media can’t escape that happening site of public communication. However, it’s also the nature of social media, which makes it a happy hunting ground for news media.

Move over TV news

Since its default mode is to swing from outrage to ridicule, social media ‘events’ end up setting agenda for mainstream media. Social media platforms are in a present a challenge to TV and new media the way TV media gave competition to print in late 1990s and the first decade of this century. It was a phase in the news industry when newspapers were grappling with giving exclusive television stories front-page coverage because the story had hooked the nation round the clock the previous day.

One may recall the inflection point of August 2006. Television news carried a live telecast of an operation to rescue a 5-year-old boy, Prince, from an abandoned borewell in a village in Haryana. It was a story that won’t have merited more than a box item in newspapers of pre-television days. But, the way it became a talking point throughout the day forced papers to have it on page one the next day.

Sociologist Shiv Viswanathan had described it as page one-and-half story for print — socially dramatic enough to be page 1 and trivial enough to be page 3, so caught somewhere in between. That’s a form of agenda setting that Indian newspapers have learnt to live with. Now social media is forcing the same not only on print, but also on television and digital media.

There, though, a sense of loss in legacy media when their claims of exclusive access to public figures and celebrities has thinned out in times when these people don’t need media houses to speak to their fans and followers. They have their own social media accounts for direct communication. While this might have dented the aura or mystique around celebrities, it has certainly undermined the need for conduits. News media is now trying to compensate for that loss by reporting excessively on social media messages of such public figures.

The dangers of the overuse of social media exchanges for creating news stories are sometimes rooted in both the nature of social media and editorial orientation of media houses. One of them being their love for nitpicking and social media offers the daily, sometimes hourly, fodder for it. Being a minefield of gaffes, off-the-cuff remarks, dramatic video footage or simply fragile arguments to attack, social media sustains the polarised news and opinion space of news media with foible-centric narratives.

A glance at the front pages of major newspapers of last few days can give enough clues on how news agenda was defined by an ‘outrageous’ statement or even a video found in social media space. Writing for The Indian Express, five months after the Modi government assumed office at the centre in 2014, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta had warned against the dangers of such facile spells of self-congratulation: “As critics, we often define our identities by picking out the worst arguments and the worst characters to go after. This is not because of the magnitude of the objective threats they pose. It is because our intellectual victories are easy.”

In negotiating the uncertain terrain of emerging media scene, news media seems to have surrendered a bit of its prerogative of news-gathering to social media. While a part of it may be rooted in the evolution of the 21st century news experience, a large measure of it also reveals news media’s continuing penchant for something as basic as a readily available spectacle.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26