Twitter journalism in Ireland: sourcing and trust in the age of social media^*

* An earlier version of this paper was originally published in the 2015 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society: Heravi, B. R., Harrower, N., Sourcing and Trust: Twitter Journalism in Ireland, International Conference on Social Media and Society, Canada, September 2015.

ABSTRACT

Twitter has been widely adopted into journalistic workflows, as it provides instant and widespread access to a plethora of content about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events. The content on Twitter, however, poses several challenges for journalists, as it arrives unfiltered, full of noise, and at an alarming velocity. Building on the results of the first national survey of social media use in Irish newsrooms, this paper investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic workflows, journalists’ attitudes towards various aspects of social media, and the content and perspectives generated by these online communities. It particularly investigates how Twitter shapes the processes of sourcing and verification in newsrooms, and assesses how notions of trust factor into the adoption of the Twitter platform and content into these processes. The paper further analyses relationships between journalist profile and adopted practices and attitudes, and seeks to understand how Twitter operates in the current journalistic landscape. While this paper draws its data from a survey of journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing, and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Social journalism
• social media
• news
• sourcing
• data journalism
• verification
• Twitter
• journalism
• trust

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Bahareh Heravi is the leader of Insight News Lab and a Research Fellow at Insight Centre for Data Analytics in National University of Ireland, Galway. She is also a Lecturer in Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. She is the former Lead Data Scientist at the Irish Times, and the co-founder of Irish Times Data.[email: [email protected]].

Dr Natalie Harrower is the Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland, Ireland's national trusted digital repository for social and cultural data. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

* An earlier version of this paper was originally published in the 2015 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society: Heravi, B. R., Harrower, N., Sourcing and Trust: Twitter Journalism in Ireland, International Conference on Social Media and Society, Canada, September 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) [grant numbers 12/TIDA/I2389, SFI/12/RC/2289, 13/TIDA/I2723, 13/TIDA/I2743 and 14/TIDA/2419].