Institute For The Future

The Promise and Problems of Chat Apps in Journalism

As social media platforms grapple with how to define their role as leading sources of global news sharing, a new study by Institute for the Future (IFTF) and Google reveals the increasing reliance on chat apps for sharing information means journalists have new challenges and opportunities when it comes to the global propagation of news.

Chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Messenger and others, are quickly becoming the preferred medium for digital communication, most pointedly in South Korea—which has a high saturation of chat apps and the fastest internet speeds and highest smartphone ownership rate in the world. With support from Google News Lab, IFTF conducted an ethnographic case study in Korea called Chat Apps: Frontiers and Challenges for Journalism.

The study revealed three key insights for journalists and newsrooms amid this radical shift away from traditional news dissemination platforms:

1. Millions of ordinary people are driving the flow of news through chat apps. By sharing individual messages that paraphrase, editorialize and contextualize the information, these people change the content. This potentially risks the integrity of the news and shifts authority from professional journalists to everyday citizens.

2. Chat apps are changing the way news is produced. They are used as an all-in-one device to record, edit and publish information. They also enable the building of networks of journalists who fact-check stories in real time and can help journalists and newsrooms coordinate across increasingly decentralized workplaces.

3. Chat apps are redefining the relationships between individual journalists and their audiences, which creates new opportunities to monetize the exchange of information. Through chat apps individual journalists can build much closer relationships with their readers and that creates new funding opportunities like crowdfund reporting projects. News organizations, on the other hand, are struggling to engage authentically and maintain their brand on chat apps.

Chat apps are creating new roles for people, journalists and newsrooms through the entire news cycle. They are also inspiring journalism research that explores how the democratizing potential of digital technologies undermines the practices of legacy institutions. Much of this research aims to ensure the quality of information and highlights the need to develop new models for accountability.

Our research suggests three potential approaches for journalists to preserve quality information within the chat app ecosystem:

1. News organizations, platforms, and users must work together to develop standards for identifying and classifying misinformation and disinformation.

2. Journalists should embrace the economic benefits of technology such as artificial intelligence, collaborative filtering and bots to optimize news-gathering and distribution.

3. Media organizations should take advantage of opportunities to tap into new monetization structures and provide value-add services and products.