1. Social Media as Beat
- Author
-
Marcel Broersma and Todd R. Graham
- Subjects
Politicians ,Journalism ,Twitter ,Political communication ,New Media ,COMMUNICATION ,NEWS SOURCES OF JOURNALISTS ,Digital media ,Newspaper ,News Reporting ,Election Campaign ,News Coverage ,ELECTIONS ,Political science ,Journalism Practice ,Online News ,Social media ,Journalists ,Mass media ,Netherlands ,Content Analysis ,journalism studies ,business.industry ,Sources ,Advertising ,Political Reporting ,NEWS ,New media ,United Kingdom ,Content analysis ,Political Communication ,Mass communications ,Digital Media ,business ,Newspapers ,Social Media ,news production ,ONLINE COMMUNICATION - Abstract
While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequently, these tweets were increasingly quoted in newspaper coverage. We present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports: they were either considered newsworthy as such, were a reason for further reporting, or were used to illustrate a broader news story. Consequently, we will show why politicians were successful in producing quotable tweets. While this paper, which is part of a broader project on how journalists (and politicians) use Twitter, focuses upon the coverage of election campaigns, our results indicate a broader trend in journalism. In the future, the reporter who attends events, gathers information face-to-face, and asks critical questions might instead aggregate information online and reproduce it in journalism discourse thereby altering the balance of power between journalists and sources.
- Published
- 2012