Political Journalists’ Normalization of Twitter

Abstract

Journalists are frequently doing some of their daily work on social media, spaces they did not create but have appropriated for journalistic purposes. Building on previous studies of how political journalists use social media, this study examines how news professionals and organizations are employing new affordances of the platform as they engage their audiences on Twitter. We expand on previously established narratives of normalization and negotiation of journalism’s boundaries by providing a snapshot of these processes in mid-stream, during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Our goal is to analyze how interaction-based affordances are being used by journalists and how audiences react to them. Results suggest retweets are used to promote their organization, quote tweets to comment on the work of peers at other news organizations, and replies mostly to bypass the 140-character limitation. When it comes to audiences, tweets containing multimedia and policy issues are more likely to generate engagement. Findings reveal that older forms of interaction (tweets and retweets) are more normalized than newer forms (replies and quote tweets) and journalists largely ignore members of the public, preferring to talk amongst themselves in social media echo chambers.