Logan Molyneux

What journalists retweet: Opinion, humor, and brand development on Twitter

Using Twitter, journalists may pass along comment from other users without, at least ostensibly, taking accountability for that message. Minimizing responsibility and editorial oversight, as is the case with retweets, allows a different view of individual journalists as gatekeepers. Through a qualitative textual analysis, this study finds that journalists are challenging norms of objectivity and independence on Twitter. Journalists frequently pass along subtle interpretation and analysis rather than strong opinions. Many retweets are humorous, sometimes even at journalism’s expense. Journalists also retweet many messages about themselves, working to build a personal brand and relationships with their audience. Implications for journalists, their industry, and the audience are discussed.

Branding (Health) Journalism

Observational studies of journalists on social media platforms suggest that journalists are beginning to develop personal brands using social media. Similar studies suggest that journalists covering specialty areas such as health are more likely to experiment with and adopt new forms of practice that break with the traditional tenets of journalism. Through interviews with such journalists, this study explores the perceptions, practices, and drivers of personal branding among journalists. Findings indicate journalists are squarely focused on branding at the individual level (rather than branding the organizations they work for). Journalists cite technological and cultural changes in the profession as giving rise to personal branding. They also describe the tension they feel between their obligation to uphold the traditional tenets of journalism and their perceived need to incorporate more branding into their practice, especially on social media platforms. The findings indicate that journalists may be changing the fundamental elements of branding in at least one way, exchanging the differentiation between themselves and their content for the mutual sharing and co-creation of content with their colleagues and audience.

Fact Checking the Campaign How Political Reporters Use Twitter to Set the Record Straight (or Not)

In a multichannel era of fragmented and contested political communication, both misinformation and fact checking have taken on new significance. The rise of Twitter as a key venue for political journalists would seem to support their fact-checking activities. Through a content analysis of political journalists’ Twitter discourse surrounding the 2012 presidential debates, this study examines the degree to which fact-checking techniques were used on Twitter and the ways in which journalists on Twitter adhered to the practices of either “professional” or “scientific” objectivity—the mode that underlies the fact-checking enterprise—or disregarded objectivity altogether. A typology of tweets indicates that fact checking played a notable but secondary role in journalists’ Twitter discourse. Professional objectivity, especially simple stenography, dominated reporting practices on Twitter, and opinion and commentary were also prevalent. We determine that Twitter is indeed conducive to some elements of fact checking. But taken as a whole, our data suggest that journalists and commentators posted opinionated tweets about the candidates’ claims more often than they fact checked those claims.

Identity lost? The personal impact of brand journalism

Researchers have explored the role of organizational and personal branding in journalism, paying particular attention to digital media and social network sites. While these studies have observed a rise in the incorporation of branding practices among journalists, they have largely avoided questions about the implications such shifts in practice may have on the personal identities of journalists. This study addresses that gap, drawing on interviews with 41 reporters and editors from US newspapers. The findings suggest that as reporters incorporate branding into their routines, they may feel as though they are sacrificing the ability to simultaneously maintain a personal identity online. For their part, editors seem to sympathize with journalists’ loss of personal identity but defer to organizational policies.

How journalists engage in branding on Twitter: individual, organizational, and institutional levels

ABSTRACT In a social media age, branding is an increasingly visible aspect of identity construction online. For media professionals generally and journalists especially, branding on spaces such as Twitter reveals the complicated set of forces confronting such public-facing actors as they navigate tensions between personal disclosure for authenticity and professional decorum for credibility, and between establishing one’s own distinctiveness and promoting one’s employer or other stakeholders. While studies have begun to reveal what journalists say about branding, they have yet to provide a broad profile of what they do. This study takes up that challenge through a content analysis of the Twitter profiles and tweets of a representative sample of 384 U.S. journalists. We focus on the extent of branding practices; the levels at which such branding occurs, whether to promote one’s self (individual), one’s news organization (organizational), or the journalism profession at large (institutional); and how other social media practices may be related to forms of journalistic branding. Results suggest that branding is now widely common among journalists on Twitter; that branding occurs at all three levels but primarily at the individual and organizational levels, with organizational branding taking priority; and that time on Twitter is connected with more personal information being shared.

Political Journalists’ Normalization of Twitter: Interaction and new affordances

Journalists are frequently doing some of their daily work on social media, spaces they did not create but have appropriated for journalistic purposes. Building on previous studies of how political journalists use social media, this study examines how news professionals and organizations are employing new affordances of the platform as they engage their audiences on Twitter. We expand on previously established narratives of normalization and negotiation of journalism’s boundaries by providing a snapshot of these processes in mid-stream, during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Our goal is to analyze how interaction-based affordances are being used by journalists and how audiences react to them. Results suggest retweets are used to promote their organization, quote tweets to comment on the work of peers at other news organizations, and replies mostly to bypass the 140-character limitation. When it comes to audiences, tweets containing multimedia and policy issues are more likely to generate engagement. Findings reveal that older forms of interaction (tweets and retweets) are more normalized than newer forms (replies and quote tweets) and journalists largely ignore members of the public, preferring to talk amongst themselves in social media echo chambers.

A Clearer Picture: Journalistic identity practices in words and images on Twitter

As journalists continue integrating social media into their professional work, they wrestle with ways to best represent themselves, their organizations, and their profession. Several recent studies have examined this trend in terms of branding, raising important questions about the changing ways in which journalists present themselves and how these changes may indicate shifts in their personal and professional identities. This study combines a visual content analysis of the images journalists use in their Twitter profiles with analyses of their profile text and tweets to examine how journalists present themselves online with an eye toward individual and organizational branding. Findings indicate journalists choose a branding approach and apply it consistently across their profiles, with most profiles consisting of a professional headshot while notably lacking organizational identifiers such as logos. Journalists also tend to lean toward professional rather than personal images in their profile and header photographs, indicating a possible predilection for professional identity over personal on social media.

Mobile News Consumption

This study investigates news consumption on mobile devices with the goal of identifying where mobile devices fit into people’s media repertoires and how consumption patterns on them are different from those on other platforms. Results suggest that mobile devices are almost always used along with other platforms for getting news, that news sessions on smartphones are shorter than on other platforms, and mobile news consumption happens more times per day and is spread throughout the day. Implications for the study of news consumption, news producers, and consumers are discussed.

Twitter as a tool for and object of political and electoral activity: Considering electoral context and variance among actors

ABSTRACT In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communication, especially during elections. This study positions Twitter volume as an outcome of other electoral antecedents and then assesses its relevance in election campaigns. Using a data set of more than 3 million tweets about 2014 U.S. Senate candidates from three distinct groups—news media, political actors, and the public—we find that competitiveness and money spent in the race were the main predictors of volume of Twitter discourse, and the impact of competitiveness of the race was stronger for tweets coming from the media when compared to the other groups. Twitter volume did not predict vote share for any of the 35 races studied. Our findings suggest that Twitter is better understood as a tool for political communication, and its usage may be predicted by money spent and race characteristics. As an object, Twitter use has limited power to predict electoral outcomes.

Twitter’s influence on news judgment: An experiment among journalists:

The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists (N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news they see on the platform, potentially causing them to dismiss information that many of their colleagues identify as newsworthy. Our results also indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment – for journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications, such as pack journalism, but we also see positives, as Twitter may conduit a wider array of voices into the mainstream news agenda. Twitter plays a key role in journalistic practices including, as we demonstrate here, influencing journalists’ news judgment. Twitter’s growing centrality in the news process warrants greater scrutiny from journalists and scholars.