If you are observant, you will be surprised to find our life has truly been filled by new media, that is, we do live in the era of new media. According to the thirteenth National Survey on National Reading in China, one I have translated into English, the average daily time spent by each person on the mobile phone is 62.21 minutes. Relatively speaking, the time spent reading newspapers and periodicals has decreased considerably while Chinese netizens are steadily rising. Indisputably, the traditional media ­– especially paper media ­– is gradually declining due to the impact of new media. By contrast, the new media is continuously expanding its influence. Nonetheless the new media, as a flourishing thing, should be managed with more stringent legal regulations because it is of great danger and threats the journalism seriously.

Not knowing when, “micro” has been silently integrated into everyone’s lives, so WeChat, micro-blog, microfilm, and others increasingly have become indispensable for us. These “micro” forms fill the fragmented time in people’s daily lives as well provide decisive advantages in the speed and breadth of information dissemination. Rather than simply praising them for improving the efficiency of using piecemeal time, it is more mature to pay more attention to the serious effects – the erosion of thinking ability and humanistic values. In other words, people’s ideas are the victims of information surplus. The falsity and superficiality of online information make people’s critical thinking ability dramatically deteriorate. More seriously, people don’t know how to think deeply under the bombardment of a vast source of information. A study, supported by a Summer Research Grant from San Jose State University, reveals that about 45 percent of participants indicate their level of in-depth reading and concentrated reading has decreased significantly (Ziming Liu, 2013). Evidently, with the digitized text, the reader’s concentration and depth of thinking are greatly reduced. When people are accustomed to relying on new media and the ubiquitous information push, the human brain is inevitably filled with messy information and becomes dull. The large amount of application information excavated based on human needs has led to the media dependence and proliferation of instrumental rationality. By instrumental rationality, I mean individuals do not need to know why; they do not need to make judgments based on thinking, the only method they use to help achieve is only relying on intelligent terminals. As Pew Research has shown, two-thirds of Americans said they used social media while only 16% of them were confident in their ability to evaluate information. Businesses and new media, when occupying a large amount of people’s time and energy, have cultivated people into a “group of people” who are used to receiving, forwarding, and willing to be on the lookout but are too lazy to think. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that a large number of events about “celebrities reported being dead” in China still receive extremely high reading and forwarding. In the long run, most people will unavoidably be trained as users or consumers who rely heavily on new media, rather than independent subjects with initiative.

I have no intention of eulogizing primitivism. I also enjoy all the conveniences of new media. However, the instrumental rational logic behind it cannot be ignored. The new media, while they use the passion for instrumental rationality to obtain benefits fail to truly care and respecting people than simply treating them as consumers. New media users are not able to enjoy the process of searching, speculating, hesitation, and decision making when they get the satisfaction of information acquisition in the most cost-effective way.

I must admit that with the changes of times and technologies, the “content-audience-advertising” mode traditional media rely on is no longer able to support its huge cost expenditure and become difficult to maintain, and traditional media has inevitably decayed. The economical avalanche has led to a vicious cycle: spending cuts have made news of high-quality content even less likely to happen. Lowering costs has led to the loss of more and more talented people in the industry, and they have also made traditional media audiences increasingly shrunken, and so automatically advertising revenue is even less. The traditional paper media is indeed facing decline — but only insofar as it shows times are changing, but it doesn’t mean there are no excellent reporters or talents in traditional media, nor can it prove that new media is greater than traditional media. The Tribune Code of Editorial Principles states that: “if the readers have reason to doubt the credibility of our work, quality won’t matter – they will go elsewhere. This is particularly important in this competitive multimedia world.” The core purpose of a professional news gathering team is to provide a comprehensive description of the ins and outs of reporting events, share the readers with unique insights and analysis, and trigger their logical thinking and in-depth perception. The excellent team of traditional paper media is precisely because of its ability to achieve a win-win situation of quality and realism so that it has the original and brilliant social status. Different from the commercial interests of the general definition, from the "interests" of the readers' own ideas, the traditional media owns far more than the new media.

Looking back on the new media that conforms to the development of the times, there is no denying that in recent years, for a variety of reasons, some new media – those who violated the original intention – have overly chased news such as gossip, lace, and clickbait, resulting in the extreme superficial and vulgar dissemination of the content in order to attract the readers and viewers. The ability of today’s new media to report incidents involving major public interest has declined to a creepy point. Take an example of news that happened in January: An Iranian oil tanker collided with a Chinese bulk carrier about 160 nm east of the Yangtze River estuary, causing the tanker to catch fire and 30 sailors missing. More than 10 days later, the Iranian oil tanker sank and caused 100 square kilometers of oil pollution belt. Since the incident occurred in China, most of the foreign new media reports weren’t elaborate. It was shocking that with such a large public disaster, the Chinese domestic media, with the exception of “Caixin Weekly” and a handful of other newspaper media, have almost no complete coverage in the new media field. The progress of the rescue and extinguishing of the missing crew, the probability of oil spills caused by the explosion, and the extent of the pollution damage caused to the East China Sea by the leak are all related to the immediate interests of all. In today’s new media and the eyes of people blinded by new media, it’s not as important as the news of an actress derailed in China.

New media, as a trigger, has caused unprecedented turbulence in the traditional journalist industry. In this case, I would like to share my own experience. When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an excellent journalist. So is it now. However, when I went to an internship at a newspaper the year before last, the chief editor of the newspaper told me: “You have to change your dream now, you should choose another route as quickly as possible. People today are accustomed to watching the news on the Internet while fewer and fewer are used to paying attention to news through newspapers or television. The profession of journalists is no longer popular.” I was very shocked and depressed at that time. Indeed, the traditional newspaper reporter industry has been seriously threatened. “Everyone can be self-published, everyone can be a reporter” are the buzzwords in today’s era of new media, it reflects the serious problems caused by the new media to traditional media and newspaper reporters. Some new media based on the Internet use search engines and capture technologies to make full use of Internet information, as well as cater to the tastes of audiences. They easily shared newspaper reporters' hard-working and hard-working original manuscripts, grabbed the news, and mocked the paper media on different occasions deliberately. Under this circumstance, many newspaper reporters were at a loss and began to worry about their future.

On the surface, people engaged in new media did make good use of modern technology and achieved so-called success. If you are careful, you will find that it will bring great misery. The assessment of the value of content dissemination by new media is completely different from that of newspapers: they almost pay no attention to the source of the information; their ultimate pursuit is to get more attention. To crown it all, a study published in the journal Science found that 64% of people who use Twitter for news say they have encountered something they “later discovered wasn't true,” and 16% of Twitter news users say that “they had retweeted or posted a tweet they later discovered to be false.” It is self-evident the reliability and authenticity of new media news are not guaranteed. What is more worrying is that false news has become an international issue. According to foreign media reports, the Collins dictionary was announced on the 2nd and the 2017 representative word was "false news." Publishers explained that since 2016, the word “false news” has risen rapidly in the Internet and traditional media, reaching 365%. Truth is the life of news and the essential requirement of news. Regardless of whether or not the traditional journalist industry will be overwhelmed by new media, anyone engaged in the news industry should keep the truth of the news, instead of spreading rumors freely.

News media, as a platform to provide real and powerful information, should not develop the rumors and conspiracy theories that in today’s new media have defeated the truth. The views of the new media are too cluttered and extreme, plagiarism and other abuses have also caused the impetuous nature of today's people. All in all, as far as I’m concerned, people should pay more attention to the drawbacks of the new media, to eliminate these hazards and to save the quality and depth of the article.

Work Cited

1. Credo Education, “Social Media Is Creating A New Emphasis on the Need for Critical Thinking” http://www.credoeducation.com/social-media-is-creating-a-new-emphasis-on-the-need-for-critical-thinking/

1. 2. Guangming Daily, “The 13th national reading survey results were published.” http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2016-04/19/c_128907616.htm
2. 4. Ziming Liu, “Reading behavior in the digital environment: Changes in reading behavior over the past ten years” https://doi.org/10.1108/0022041051063204

3. Roy, Sandip, “Is The Government's Crackdown On Fake News Another Way Of Controlling The Media?”, http://huffington1866.rssing.com/browser.php?indx=40948657&item=17504