Journalism as Multichannel Communication

Abstract

The use of social media reinforces the change in journalism from a single-channel activity to multichannel communications. News organizations and journalists must learn to simultaneously operate several social media channels. Furthermore, social media is multi-functional and applicable in all phases of news production and distribution. Taken together, journalism is reaching a higher level of complexity. This study’s main objective is to systematize the multiple uses of social media in journalism and explore related newsroom strategies. To this end, we surveyed editors-in-chief of German internet newsrooms (n = 105, response rate: 70 per cent) about social media use in their newsrooms. We systematically distinguished five general dimensions, with 24 specific uses of social media in journalism. The results show that Facebook and Twitter serve multiple journalistic purposes. In contrast, blogs and YouTube are more specialized tools. We conducted a cluster analysis to explore if and how these patterns vary by different strategic approaches in organizing social media use in newsrooms. While the overall pattern remains stable, more experienced and strategy-oriented newsrooms use Twitter notably more often for various tasks.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• social media
• newsroom strategy
• multichannel communication
• Facebook
• Twitter

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Among these directories were the BDZV list “Zeitungen Online” and a database of private radio programmes and TV stations managed by die-medienanstalten.de. A complete overview of the directories used in this study has been published in Neuberger, Langenohl, and Nuernbergk (2014, 36).

2. The response rate was lowest for the internet-only providers with 50 per cent (six respondents). The daily newspapers made up the largest group, with 75 cases (response rate: 66 per cent). The other respondents came from weekly newspapers/public magazines (eight respondents, response rate: 89 per cent) and broadcasting stations (16 respondents, response rate: 100 per cent).

3. Of the 91 fully completed questionnaires, 67 were answered by journalists in a leading position.

4. Before the questionnaire was developed, we interviewed five journalists with leading roles (editors-in-chief) or with managerial roles with responsibility for social media from the following media outlets: Bayerischer Rundfunk, Sat.1 Online, Süddeutsche Zeitung (sueddeutsche.de), Zeit Online, and Huffington Post Deutschland. The interview guide covered the topics of editorial responsibility and coordination, strategy, appropriateness and possible uses of social media, quality and rules, as well as training and further education.

 

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen), Düsseldorf, Germany.