By KYLA THORPE

I feel like the way that our culture is now, social media are now considered an official news source. Whether screen-shotting a tweet off Twitter or pulling a picture from Instagram, the candidness of these platforms appears to be what the public likes to see.

When was the last time you actually sought out to see a press release, for any recent? Even a news report from a trusted news source. Readers today don’t want to take enough time to read all of that. They want to know what happened in a single picture, or 140 characters or less.

So what does this mean for the future of journalism? Obviously we will always need writers. And as for photographers, a camera phone will never compare to the clarity living inside a Nikon D-5000. But, still, half of the time when something happens in the news, there’s an image of a public figure’s tweet or a video someone took at a moment’s notice.

Maybe writing styles will become more lax, I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting to see in the future how much more accountability that social media holds. We no longer live in an age where we need official reports and public speeches. It’s enough for us to see a picture on a verified social media account and we trust it.