Political Journalists and Their Social Media Audiences: New Power Relations

Axel Bruns and Christian Nuernbergk
Additional contact information
Axel Bruns: Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Christian Nuernbergk: Media Studies, Trier University, Germany

Media and Communication, 2019, vol. 7, issue 1, 198-212

Abstract: Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country’s media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.

Keywords: Australia; interactions; Germany; network analysis; political journalism; press corps; social media; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/1759 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v7:y:2019:i:1:p:198-212

DOI: 10.17645/mac.v7i1.1759

Access Statistics for this article

Media and Communication is currently edited by Raquel Silva

More articles in Media and Communication from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().