SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT

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.

Keywords:

• election campaign
• journalism
• news reporting
• newspapers
• social media
• sources
• Twitter

Notes

1. Articles that were not directly on the election but sourced a parliamentary candidate were also included.

2. The coding scheme was based on the codebook developed for the research project “Reporting at the Boundaries of the Public Sphere. Form, Style and Strategy of European Journalism, 1880–2005”, directed by Broersma and supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cf. Harbers and den Herder (2010).

3. Another limitation of this study is that we only identified articles that cited tweets. It could be that journalists are using, for example, politicians’ tweets on a particular issue without properly referencing the source.

4. In a larger research project, we are analysing the use of tweets in general as a source for reporting in (British and Dutch) popular and tabloid newspapers (2007–2011).