Week 5 Reflection

Week 5 Reflection
When looking at everything we talked about this week I had two-major takeaways. The first of which, is that in general, we as a society have become somewhat passive when it comes to how we receive news. One of the articles about curation and aggregation analogized this to how Americans eat fast food, not really knowing exactly if what we are eating is what we think it is and that we’re not really sure if we trust where its coming from. While I’d argue we have some degree of understanding of what we read’s validity and source reputation, a good portion of what is out there isn’t quite up to par in that sense.
While I am a huge advocate for social media and using it as a means to spread information, its not without its drawbacks. The way the algorithms have built themselves can sometimes lead to the perpetuation of misinformation spread. By creating aggregated platforms, such as Google News, it takes a few steps out of the way for us as readers to find the information we most desperately need, but it adds an additional platform that we as users need to be conscious of checking. I see aggregation sites as a double-edged sword. While they in some ways ensure that what is being pushed out is trustworthy information built on solid reporting, the responsibility of the user is still there. In a world in which we are all social media users on a minimum of two to three platforms per person, adding in another platform to be responsible for is for many daunting, and risks taking the backseat to more social information rather than news itself.
After reading about The Skimm as a pretty avid user myself, I am even more impressed with the founders than I was prior. With my marketing background front of mind as well as my journalistic one, I am in awe of how these women were able to define a target market and stick to providing them with the information needed, meeting them where they are at. It is truthfully a genius platform, and it is evident through their podcast and other endeavors beyond the newsletter itself that they entrepreneurialized this brainchild to a height that 10 years ago wasn’t even something deemed imaginable. I became so inspired by the brand that while I was reading this I actually applied for a marketing position at their headquarters in New York because of how much I back their core mission and want to be part of a group that strives to keep their audience informed, engaged and meets them at their needs, but in a symbiotic way.