Todd Graham

SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT Tweets as a news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections

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.

Twitter as a news source : How Dutch and British newspapers used tweets in their news coverage, 2007–2011

Twitter has become a convenient, cheap and effective beat for journalists in search of news and information. Reporters today increasingly aggregate information online and embed it in journalism discourse. In this paper, we analyse how tweets have increasingly been included as quotes in newspaper reporting during the rise of Twitter from 2007 to 2011. The paper compares four Dutch and four British national tabloids and broadsheets, asking if tabloid journalists are relying more on this second-hand coverage than their colleagues from quality papers. Moreover, we investigate in which sections of the paper tweets are included and what kinds of sources are quoted. Consequently, we present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports. Reporters do include these utterances as either newsworthy or to support or illustrate a story. In some cases, individual tweets or interaction between various agents on Twitter even triggers news coverage. We argue that this new discursive practice alters the balance of power between journalists and sources.

New platform, old habits? Candidates’ use of Twitter during the 2010 British and Dutch general election campaigns:

Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines.

Needles in a Haystack: A New Approach for Identifying and Assessing Political Talk in Nonpolitical Discussion Forums

Abstract Talking politics online is not exclusively reserved for politically-orientated discussion forums, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. People talk politics just about anywhere online from reality TV discussion forums to numerous other forum genres. Thus, the need to tap into those discussions is important if our aim is to provide a more comprehensive overview of the online discursive landscape. However, widening our scope of analysis presents us with a new set of diffi culties, namely, how do we identify political talk within the vast pool of threads and postings, and how do we assess such talk in light of the public sphere, while at the same time, taking into account its informal nature. The aim of this article is to tackle these questions by presenting a methodological approach, which attempts to detect, describe, and assess political talk in non-political discussion forums.

Beyond “Political” Communicative Spaces: Talking Politics on the Wife Swap Discussion Forum

ABSTRACT Net-based public sphere researchers have examined online deliberation in numerous ways. However, most studies have focused exclusively on political discussion forums. This article moves beyond such spaces by analyzing political talk from an online forum dedicated to reality television. The purpose is to examine the democratic quality of political talk that emerges in this space in light of a set of normative criteria of the public sphere. The analysis also moved beyond an elite model of deliberation by investigating the use of expressives (humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgments). The findings reveal that participants engaged in political talk that was often deliberative. It was a space where the use of expressives played a significant role in enhancing such talk.

Reality TV as a trigger of everyday political talk in the net-based public sphere

It is news journalism that is commonly considered the practice that reports on the political and invites us to act as citizens. However, there are other media genres, forms and content that may provoke the citizen in us. They not only provide talking points but also facilitate communicative spaces whereby active audiences transform into deliberating publics by bridging their knowledge, identities and experiences to society through everyday, informal political talk. The internet provides a public space whereby this everyday-life politicization can occur bottom-up. This article addresses this process of politicization in the context of political talk and discusses the boundaries between private and public by examining how it emerges in forums dedicated to British popular reality TV programmes. The article pays particular attention to the shift from non-political talk to the lifestyle-based political issues and the more conventional political topics that arise, and explores the triggers of such talk.

What’s Wife Swap got to do with it? Talking politics in the net-based public sphere

The aim of this study then is to move beyond politically oriented discussion forums by also examining the communicative practices of participants within fan-based forums. The focus is on how participants talk politics in online informal discussion forums. By informal discussion forums, I am referring to those forums that are not bound to any formal predetermined agendas such as e-consultations or e-juries, but rather to forums who’s primary purpose is to simply provide a communicative space for talk, e.g. fan-based discussion forums, news media message boards, and Usenet newsgroups. By political talk, I am referring to everyday, informal, political conversation carried out freely between participants in these online spaces, which is often spontaneous and lacks any purpose outside the purpose of talk for talk sake, representing the practical communicative form of what Habermas (1984, p. 327) calls communicative action. It is through this type of everyday political talk whereby citizens achieve mutual understanding about the self and each other, and it represents the fundamental ingredient of the public sphere. The purpose of this study first is a normative one; it is to examine the democratic quality of this fundamental ingredient, of the communicative practices of participants within online discussions forums in light of a set of normative conditions of the public sphere. It is also to move beyond a formal notion of deliberation (beyond rationality via argumentation) by providing a more accurate account of how the political emerges in online discussions (particularly within nonpolitically oriented forums), how people actually talk politics in those discussions, and finally, how alternative communicative forms such as humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgements interact and influence the more ‘traditional’ elements of deliberation (e.g. rational-critical debate and reciprocity). Consequently, I present the following three research questions, which are central to this study: To what extent do the communicative practices of online political discussions satisfy the normative conditions of the process of deliberation of the public sphere? What role, if any, do expressives (humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgements) play within online political discussions and in relation to the normative conditions of deliberation? How does political talk emerge in nonpolitically oriented discussion forums? Together, the answers to these questions present a more comprehensive account of online political talk. They seek not only to offer insight into the quality of such talk, but also to provide a better understanding of its expressive and affective nature. Moreover, they seek to improve our understanding of how political talk occurs outside the realm of politically oriented discussion forums, and how it emerges in such communicative spaces. Therefore, in order to answer these questions and provide this insight, I examine and compare political talk within three online discussion forums of the Guardian, Big Brother, and Wife Swap. A comparative study design with normative, descriptive, and explorative characteristics was utilized. A content analysis with both qualitative and quantitative features was employed as the primary instrument for examination. Additional textual and network analyses were carried out to provide more depth to the investigation.

A Tale of Two Stories from "Below the Line": Comment Fields at the Guardian

This article analyzes the nature of debate on “below the line” comment fields at the United Kingdom’s Guardian, and how, if at all, such debates are impacting journalism practice. The article combines a content analysis of 3,792 comments across eighty-five articles that focused on the UN Climate Change Summit, with ten interviews with journalists, two with affiliated commentators, plus the community manager. The results suggest a more positive picture than has been found by many existing studies: Debates were often deliberative in nature, and journalists reported that it was positively impacting their practice in several ways, including providing new story leads and enhanced critical reflection. However, citizen–journalist debate was limited. The results are attributed to the normalization of comment fields into everyday journalism practice, extensive support and encouragement from senior management, and a realization that comment fields can actually make the journalists’ life a little easier.

Closing the gap?: Twitter as an instrument for connected representation

In this chapter, we present a typology of the tweeting behaviour of candidates as a means of analysing the extent to which politicians are harnessing the potential of social media to actively interact with their constituents. Our research, which included content analysis of tweets (n = 13,637) from all the Conservative and Labour tweeting candidates during the 2010 U.K. General Election, focused on four aspects of tweets: type (normal post, interaction, retweet, retweet with comment); interaction (with, e.g. a politician, journalist, citizen); function (e.g. updating, promoting, advice giving, debating); and topic. Additionally, a qualitative reading on the use of personal tweets was carried out. By examining candidates’ tweeting behaviour, we show that British politicians still mainly use Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. They are neglecting the possibility this social network offers for, what we call, connected representation.

The use of expressives in online political talk: impeding or facilitating the normative goals of deliberation?

Net-based public sphere researchers have questioned whether the internet presents the public sphere with a new opportunity for the development of public spaces where free, equal and open deliberation among citizens can flourish. However, much of the research has operationalized a formal notion of deliberation thereby neglecting the expressive nature of everyday political talk. This study moved beyond a formal notion by also investigating the use of expressives within The Guardian (UK) political discussion forum. A content analysis was employed as the primary instrument for examination. Additional textual analyses were conducted on the use of expressives. The findings suggest that with the exception of humour expressives tended to impede political talk rather than facilitating it.