My title was supposed to mimic one of the recent Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie titles, but I don’t really think it worked. 

I’ll be honest I don’t have a formal title to my research question yet. I can think of about a dozen ways to type it out, and they all look equally bad. So that is a work in progress. The question I would like to answer relates to critical breaking news and how people react when accessing the news information via social media sites (Twitter & Facebook) compared to actual confirmed journalistic sources from print or the television. In my head I am breaking those two categories and calling them “old school” and “new school.” Old school being the more traditional way of consuming news, and new school representing the newer way of doing things.

The clues I used to find my 5 sources are a handful of key terms and phrases. The first term I used was “Online News Consumption” which led me to:

“Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparativeanalysis”

This journal is important because it is the natural “beginning” of the question that I am curious about. The journal talks about people not considering social media to be a news platform. And that while using Facebook or Twitter, they aren’t purposely searching for news updates. But the algorithms and feature sets that social media provides us with put things that we are projected to be interested in right in front of us. Now rather than looking at funny cat photos or the latest recipe including the inappropriate use of guacamole (which should only be eaten with a tortilla chip…) we are presented with the latest local or national news article.

Truthfully that was my best search term. I was able to use it as a stepping stone to get to new articles and more related content.

Oh my. Related Content is such a “social media” term. Look at that, a first class example of the brainwashing we are all subjected to on a daily basis. I would have never used that term 5 years ago.

Besides the point, I’m getting off track.

After “online news consumption” I used other similar search terms. I tried “twitter news” and “digital news” which got me some mixed results.

I think the term that I would have liked to refine more and perhaps find some more information on is “crisis news.”

The study that I am thinking about proposing will relate directly to a “breaking news” situation or a staged crisis of some sort. I want to see how people react, and where they go for what they perceive to be the most accurate and reliable source of news.