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Abstract
Digital technology, the internet and mobile media are transforming the journalism and media landscape by influencing the sourcing process. We combined in-depth interviews and a content analysis of the 1424 Twitter “followings” of eight Belgian health journalists to clarify how they use the platform to monitor and use sources. The findings show that top-down actors are overrepresented in the journalists’ sourcing practices and that Twitter is not used to reach out to bottom-up actors, especially ordinary citizens. We found that health journalists mainly use Twitter to monitor other media actors, indicating a process of inter-media agenda setting. In line with previous studies, health experts are the second most important group of sources as they play an important role in translating complex health matters. Overall, the interviews suggest that Twitter is used in a basic fashion for news sourcing, mainly to stay up to date and search for story ideas.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The original total sample contained 1936 cases. Eighty-four cases or 81 unique Twitter profiles were deleted from the sample because it was unclear which type of actor was behind the profile (e.g. “The Tweet of God”) or because the profile did not fit in one of our actor categories (e.g. celebrity, religious actor). As such, these profiles were not relevant to our analysis.