Irena Wolska-Zogata

Between the market and social responsibility of media. An analysis of selected magazines devoted to health issues

Treating mass media as an education channel, the Authors of the article tried to find an answer to the question if polish media meet the expectations of public health and health promotion. Data used as the background to the thesis come from press market analysis and readership researches. Also non-representative research on health-journalists has been presented. The Authors focus on health press market seeking for information who is the publisher and who is the editor of health communications. Who is the target of such communications? In whose interest the certain contents are created?

System of social communication is constantly evolving. The history of media shows that new technologies play a significant role in the formation and perception of social environment. In the 21st century, the influence of the Internet on the functioning of the social, political and media institutions has become a subject of interest shared by numerous scholars working within the field of communication and social sciences.
Changes in the area of the media are thought to have important economic, cultural, and social consequences. However, the nature and scale of these changes are rather controversial (Briggs i Burke 2010). Technological changes, also those occurring in the world of media, result in drawing two risky conclusions. First of them is that the changes are perceived as an enemy (things are getting worse); second of them is – in opposition to the first one – that changes are seen as progress. In the media, the newest technologies have transformed the nature of the work of organisation and media workers, range of persons creating content, ways of retrieving and spreading information, ways of creating news, as well as ways of news consumption. This article presents changes taking place in the media environment and attempts to indicate further possible directions taken by these changes.
The article undertake to indicate the possible direction in which they follow the media and journalism in the era of the dominance of social media, with a focus on the role of Facebook. Is the journalist continues to be the provider of news? What comes down the function of searching for information? Where consumers are looking for news and whether a journalist is still a credible figure?