Broersma, M and Graham, T orcid.org/0000-0002-5634-7623 (2012) SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT: Tweets as news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Journalism Practice, 6 (3). pp. 403-419. ISSN 1751-2786
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2012 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journalism Practice on 20 March 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2012.663626. |
Keywords: | Election Campaign; Journalism; News Reporting; Newspapers; Social Media; Sources; Twitter |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Sep 2017 13:55 |
Last Modified: | 16 Jan 2018 17:36 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/17512786.2012.663626 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:113487 |