TWITTER AS A NEWS SOURCE

Abstract

Twitter has become a convenient, cheap and effective beat for journalists in search of news and information. Reporters today increasingly aggregate information online and embed it in journalism discourse. In this paper, we analyse how tweets have increasingly been included as quotes in newspaper reporting during the rise of Twitter from 2007 to 2011. The paper compares four Dutch and four British national tabloids and broadsheets, asking if tabloid journalists are relying more on this second-hand coverage than their colleagues from quality papers. Moreover, we investigate in which sections of the paper tweets are included and what kinds of sources are quoted. Consequently, we present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports. Reporters do include these utterances as either newsworthy or to support or illustrate a story. In some cases, individual tweets or interaction between various agents on Twitter even triggers news coverage. We argue that this new discursive practice alters the balance of power between journalists and sources.

Keywords:

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

Notes

1. A possible limitation of this study is that we only identified articles that cited tweets. Journalists might be using tweets without properly attributing them. However, based on an experiment in which we, by means of plagiarism detection software, compared tweets from politicians with newspapers’ news coverage, we are quite confident that the effects of this limitation are limited. We found no (parts of) tweets that were not attributed.

2. This coding scheme draws from 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).

3. Note that there were no tweets sourced during the sampling period for 2007 and most of 2008.

4. The categories human interest, lifestyle and royalty have been clustered under Human Interest; Politics includes politics and government, international relations and social welfare; Science includes education and science and technology; Other includes nature and the environment, health care, religion and beliefs, and other.