Abstract
Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country’s media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.
Highlights
In spite of considerable reluctance and even hostility towards social media at earlier stages, journalists have broadly accepted tools such as Facebook and especially Twitter as part of their overall professional toolkit
In becoming more active on social media, journalists are going where their audiences and potential sources are. In doing so they expose themselves to new media logics: “with social media, journalism and audiences meet on uncommon ground” (Loosen & Schmidt, 2016, p. 7)
We focus on the national parliamentary press corps, examining all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts
Summary
In spite of considerable reluctance and even hostility towards social media at earlier stages, journalists have broadly accepted tools such as Facebook and especially Twitter as part of their overall professional toolkit. Journalists have recognised the utility of social media especially as sources of live updates during breaking news situations (Bruno, 2011); many subjects of journalists’ stories are present on and even notorious for their usage of social media (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013); journalists have been actively encouraged to develop a social media presence by the social media ‘evangelists’ employed by their organisations (Tenore, 2010); and at a time of considerable industrial change and employment precarity, journalists derive career benefits from developing a strong “personal brand” independent of the news organisation (Molyneux & Holton, 2015) This gradual embrace of social media as platforms for monitoring, sourcing, disseminating, and discussing news stories recognises broader, generational transformations: as the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Journalists, sources, audiences, and other stakeholders encounter each other in a “third space” (Wright, Graham, & Jackson, 2016), and must adapt to the rules of that space Such rules are co-evolved between platform providers and users, influenced by the platforms’ communicative affordances, the providers’ explicit governance decisions, and the user community’s implicit conventions. This has the potential to fundamentally affect and alter the power relations between the various participants in news and journalism
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