“Wearing a Bullet-Proof Vest”: Social Media Use in Journalism Production Within African–Intercontinental Investigative Networks

ABSTRACT

Today’s “networked journalism” is blurring physical boundaries, with practice progressively negotiated through digital and communication technologies. This paper explores social media use within African–Intercontinental investigative journalism networks (IJNs), as journalists practice amid surveillance and censorship. Rooted in theories of Power in the Age of Social Media and augmented with elements of Structural Holes theory, data were elicited through in-depth interviews with 12 journalists from west and southern African IJNs. The findings are that various encrypted, team-based social media apps are deployed to minimize/evade physical harm and state interference at the initial contact, researching, reporting and writing stages of the production chain. Thematic data analysis revealed a typology of four brokerage roles undertaken by foreign members of IJNs filling structural holes—as Boundary spanners, Bridges, Brokers and Go-betweens. Furthermore, challenges affecting social media use include journalists’ skill set, Internet penetration, foreign members’ decisions, fear of state surveillance, and exposure by adversaries and colleagues. In contributing an empirical narrative of the African perspective to global literature on investigative journalism, this paper concludes that further scholarly attention is warranted, not solely into social media use in African investigative journalism production, but with a deliberate incorporation of the wider socio-political contexts in which practice is occurring.

KEYWORDS:

• African journalism
• cross-border journalism
• investigative journalism
• media power
• social network theory
• social media use
• brokerage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ruona Meyer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8391-0306