Abstract

Twitter is a social networking platform that connects its users to information in the form of posts that are a maximum of 140 characters long. Twitter has become an important method for news distribution for both print and broadcast news stations. News organizations, individuals and journalists all use Twitter for different purposes, which raises questions as to how local television news reporters tweets both as journalists and as individuals. This study analyzes the tweets of the personal Twitter accounts of five local television news reporters from each of the local television news stations in Toronto (City News, CTV Toronto, Global Toronto, CP24 and CBC Toronto). Findings reveal the existence of blurring of personal (individualistic) and professional (journalistic) uses of Twitter. The tweets from the personal Twitter accounts of local television news reporters in Toronto suggest that while these reporters still take their gatekeeping roles as journalists seriously, they sometimes take advantage of Twitter as a platform that encourages public declaration and personal observations

Highlights

  • Twitter, a microblogging platform, was created in San Francisco, California and launched in October 2006 (Honey & Herring, 2009)

  • City News is owned by Rogers Media, Global News Toronto is owned by Shaw Media, CBC Toronto is owned by the Canadian government and CTV and CablePulse 24 (CP24) are owned by Bell Media

  • The news hour for City News is at 5:00 p.m., Global News is at 5:30 p.m., CBC News is at 5:00 p.m., CTV News is at 6:00 p.m. and CP24 is at 5:00 p.m

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Summary

Introduction

A microblogging platform, was created in San Francisco, California and launched in October 2006 (Honey & Herring, 2009). Twitter users can send messages, called tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. Users can designate their tweets as public, which allows their tweets to appear on Twitter’s public timeline located on the Twitter homepage (Honey & Herring, 2009). Twitter is a social networking platform used as a news dissemination tool by both print and broadcast news organizations (Armstrong & Gao, 2010). Twitter provides a platform where users are able to tweet a combination of information and observation, outside the boundaries of the established order of the information dissemination processes of traditional print or broadcast news (Hermida, 2012). In 2007, The Oregonian became one of the first newspapers to use Twitter as a news dissemination tool. By 2010, 197 out of 198 American newspapers and TV stations had an official Twitter account (Messner et al, 2011)

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