The Partial Observer by Bill Bellen

The Recession of Reporting

My Senior Project on the Evolution of Journalism

From the first day as a freshman at Milford Central School, students hear talk of one dreaded assignment: the Senior Interdisciplinary Project, or SIP for short. Research projects are scattered throughout class curriculums in the high school, preparing students for the culmination of their efforts. Toward the end of junior year, students are tasked with crafting a SIP proposal. This entails choosing three disciplines of focus for the project, identifying a new technology to learn the reins of, and an overarching topic to guide an eventual thesis. This task is monumental for many, and one can see where the students’ anxiety comes from.

However, I looked at this project differently. I saw SIP as an opportunity that had never really presented itself to me before: An opportunity to dig into a topic and let my passion for the subject of my choosing flourish. Now the only challenge was what to do my SIP on in the first place.

As someone who has been infatuated with history for a long time, I wanted to incorporate aspects of this field of study into my work. In addition, my employment as a photographer at Cooperstown Dreams Park since the summer of 2022 has instilled a powerful passion for photography in me that had to find its way into my project. Finally, the consideration of my incessant following of news coverage, both local and global, led me to my answer. I decided that my project’s focus would be on the evolution of journalism over the last century. With the disciplines of photography, psychology and social media defining my studies, I got to work right away at the start of this school year.

I began with an extensive multi-month-long period of research and data collection. This entailed delving into the characters and technologies that defined the evolution of journalism as a whole since roughly the Spanish American War. From yellow journalism, to the advent of television, to the breakdown of ethics as we approach today, I gained immense swaths of knowledge that I was previously unaware of.

As I continued my research, I began to realize the importance of highlighting the state of journalism today. The declining integrity and impact of photography, the dire state of collective American psychology with regard to confirmation and negativity biases, and the role of social media in incentivizing these downward trends has presented quite the conundrum for the field.

With this in mind, I began to experiment with social media; my new technology for the project. Unlike many in my generational cohort, I have never downloaded any of these apps and have actively sought to not engage with their divisiveness and attention-grabbing. This provided me with what I felt was a unique position to look into the role of social media in journalistic degradation.

My experiment consisted of analyzing the Instagram algorithm to see how quickly I could be sent down a rabbit hole of confirmation bias-affirming posts from one side of the political spectrum. I began with following solely Fox News, and would engage with its content for five minutes a day, followed by scrolling through my exploratory feed for five minutes. If a new account was recommended to me three times in one session, I would follow it, and add it to my home feed.

In doing this, I saw how rapidly these echo chambers of ideas can form. Within two weeks, I had followed over half a dozen new accounts and was receiving only news that aligned with the beliefs of those I followed. This perfectly illustrated the point I was making, of how social media is incentivizing the political division seen in not only the news, but across our country today.

However, this is where I seemingly hit a brick wall. As I began to plan for the second phase of my experiment—seeing how quickly the feed would shift toward more liberal ideology if I chose to only engage in left-leaning content—Instagram stopped me in my tracks. Changes to the app and algorithm meant the home feed no longer solely consisted of accounts you follow, but would eventually merge with the exploratory feed after scrolling for roughly a minute.

While I initially thought this put a stop to my experiment, I later came to realize this proved my point even more so. Instagram’s shift in content recommendation here aligned exactly with the engagement-driven business model that my SIP had been detailing. By filling users’ home pages full of ads and recommendations of new content sharing their views, the platform is able to reinforce these feedback loops of ideas like never before, encapsulating many of the practices of these profit hungry tech companies in full view.

Though my SIP has a much broader focus than solely the role of social media’s impact on journalism, this factor of my presentation is certainly what I believe is most important to analyze moving forward. As I begin to finalize my project ahead of its presentation on March 27, I am increasingly inclined to hone in on the rapid speed of journalism’s evolution since the turn of the 21st century.

From the days of the Murrow Boys covering conflict across Europe, to the modern era of the daily blogger, journalism has been an ever-changing field, jumping from medium to medium of distribution. As we look ahead to the future, I argue that it is important to look back to the past to see the pitfalls of the strategies that have done more harm than good. If we can move forward with good, moral intent, and have journalists in the field who intend to be the distributors of information, rather than predators of emotion, then the future of the fourth estate may not be as bleak as some predict.

If any readers are curious about the contents of my SIP—whether it be the depths of the historical study, or the psychological curiosities of today—feel free to reach out at williamrbellen@gmail.com for a copy of the script and sources for my presentation.

Bill Bellen is a senior at Milford Central School.