Political journalists’ corporate and personal identities on Twitter profile pages: A comparative analysis in four Westminster democracies

Abstract

The practice for journalists to present an identity and brand the self on social media has become common across many newsrooms, yet its practice is still poorly understood. Focusing on journalists’ self-representations on the social network site Twitter, this study aims to address the lack of empirical understanding through an analysis of the identities which political journalists present on their Twitter profile pages. A total of 679 accounts of parliamentary press gallery journalists in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom were analyzed, with a focus on various textual and visual pieces of professional and personal information. The article develops scales of corporate and personal identity, finding that UK and Canadian journalists most strongly differentiate between personal and corporate identities. Differences across countries are linked to political and economic aspects of the respective media systems.