How Age Affects Journalists’ Adoption of Social Media as an Innovation

Abstract

American newsrooms are adopting social media as an innovation for greater engagement. However, several organizational and individual factors may affect the extent to which news outlets adopt social media innovations. In particular, there is assumed to be a divide among different age groups of journalists in embracing social media. Utilizing a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, the study seeks to understand how social media culture in newsrooms affects journalists’ strategies of taking social media as an innovation, and how journalists of different age groups differ in the SEM model fit. The analyses indicated Twitter engagement mediates social media culture and journalists’ attitude toward social media. However, that was not the case with Facebook. Additionally, while younger journalists favored Twitter, older journalists embraced Facebook and middle-aged journalists adopted both Facebook and Twitter. The analyses showed the more that middle-aged journalists interacted on Twitter, the more they tended to have a positive attitude toward social media. However, the more that younger and older journalists engaged on Twitter, the more they tended to have a negative attitude toward social media. Journalists from all three age groups tended to hold a negative attitude toward social media if they engaged more on Facebook.

Keywords:

• social media
• innovation
• diffusion of information
• age
• multiple-group SEM analysis
• American journalists

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.