Is Social Media the End of Journalism? | Playboy: The new distribution networks spent a decade growing, and they are now bigger than the biggest of the old networks. In the 1980s, when the evening broadcast news was at the height of its reach, 55 million people tuned in to the three networks. Today 128 million Americans will use Facebook, the biggest of the new networks; tens of millions will use its smaller siblings, and millions will use e-mail to share stories they love with friends. This is the network of people bored at work or bored on the couch at home.
This new distribution network doesn’t require a broadcast tower or a printing press, but it can reach more people than those expensive old mechanisms can. There’s only one catch: To reach these people, you have to write an article so funny, so revelatory or so trenchant that they will actively share it with their friends. To go viral, you have to do something excellent—whether it’s creating the most penetrating list of owls to date or a 10,000-word expos�of false family legends attributed to Mitt Romney.