Journalism and Social Media: Practitioners, Organisations and Institutions

177 Pages·2017·1.808 MB·English

by  Diana Bossio (auth.)

JOURNALISM
AND SOCIAL MEDIA
PRACTITIONERS, ORGANISATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS
Diana Bossio
Journalism and Social Media
Diana Bossio
Journalism and Social
Media
Practitioners, Organisations and Institutions
Diana Bossio
Swinburne University
Hawthorn, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-65471-3 ISBN 978-3-319-65472-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65472-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949199
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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P
reface
Some concepts used in this book have come from research that I have
previously published. None of these publications has been repro-
duced in part or in total in this book. Discussion of the Arab Spring in
Chap. 3 draws upon concepts from the book chapters ‘Journalism dur-
ing the Arab Spring: Interactions and Challenges’ and ‘War of Worlds?
Alternative and Mainstream Journalistic Practices in Coverage of the
“Arab Spring” Protests’.
Discussion of the relations between social media managers and jour-
nalists in Chaps. 4 and 5 draw upon concepts from the journal article
‘Don’t Tweet This! How Journalists and Media Organisations Negotiate
Tensions Emerging from the Implementation of Social Media Policy in
Newsrooms’.
Discussion of journalists’ representations of personal and profes-
sional identity on social media in Chap. 6 draws upon concepts from
the journal article ‘From “Selfies” to Breaking Tweets: How Journalists
Negotiate Personal and Professional Identity on Social Media’.
These inclusions are referenced in the text of the chapters.
Hawthorn, Australia Diana Bossio
v
a
cknowledgements
I am indebted to a number of people for their support during the
research and writing of this book. Firstly, I owe a debt of gratitude to
the incredible scholars who took the time to critique drafts of this man-
uscript. In particular, I must thank Associate Professor Alfred Hermida
for reviewing my proposal, as well as Dr. Anthony McCosker, Dr. Renee
Barnes, Professor Folker Hanusch, Professor David Domingo and
Dr. Avery Holton for providing feedback on drafts of these chapters.
Your feedback was invaluable: thank you.
I probably owe my sanity to the staff in the Department of Media
and Communication at Swinburne University. Thank you for your sup-
port and good grace when I was either especially busy, absent or forget-
ful during writing and editing. Thanks especially to Peter Marcato and
Julian Novitz for picking up some of the administrative slack, and Esther
Milne, Lisa Gye, Steven Conway, Cèsar Albarran-Torres, Dan Golding,
Rowan Wilken and Anthony McCosker (again!) for their patience and
friendship.
The Faculty of Health, Arts and Design at Swinburne University has
supported parts of the research in this book, as well as providing time
away from my desk, which allowed me to finish writing. My thanks to
Dr. Carolyn Beasley for facilitating this support.
Thank you to the editorial and production staff at Palgrave, especially
Felicity Plester, Heloise Harding and Martina O’Sullivan, for their
enthusiasm and professionalism.
vii
viii ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my students for putting up with my ‘book brain’: I thank you,
I am sorry and I will reply to your emails.
My eternal gratitude to my mum and dad, for everything really, but
especially for their encouragement, advice and food delivery service this
year. Thanks also to my brothers and their partners for their support and
Instagram likes.
To my best friends, Anna, Melissa, Penny and Natasha, whom I have
missed terribly while living in the ‘book cave’ for the past year. Thank
you for cheering me on and putting up with my absences.
Thank you to the people who have had to live with me while I wrote
this book, especially to Alyssia and Angelina, who have made me laugh
and kept me up to date with the best baby animal memes.
It would be remiss of me not to thank my cat, Evie, the worst writing
partner ever and co-creator of my Facebook series, ‘Reasons I Can’t Work
at Home’. Please get off my laptop.
Finally, to Troy, for three very important contributions to this book.
Firstly, thank you for gifting me your art. Secondly, thank you for your
contribution to the book’s conceptual framing, though I will probably
never know if journalism ‘is’ or ‘ism’. Lastly, thank you for your love and
support. It means everything.
c
ontents
1 Journalism and Social Media: An Introduction 1
2 Social Media and Journalism Practice 23
3 Journalism and Social Media Audiences 47
4 Social Media and the Newsroom: New Relationships,
New Policies, New Practices 67
5 Big Data, Algorithms and the Metrics of Social
Media News 89
6 Shifting Values, New Norms: Social Media and the
Changing Profession of Journalism 111
7 News in Social Media Environments: Journalism
in a ‘Post-Truth’ World 133
ix
x CONTENTS
8 Conclusion: Where to from Here for Professional
Journalism? 153
Bibliography 165
Index 167
CHAPTER 1
Journalism and Social Media: An
Introduction
It’s 1997 and you are starting a typical workday as a print journalist.
You arrive at the newsroom and grab the day’s newspapers to check the
headlines. You greet colleagues from the separate online and newspaper
teams and then check your landline for messages. You talk to the chief of
staff about the day’s events, and after the morning’s editorial meeting,
your day is organised around getting to media events, talking to sources
on the phone and following up potential leads. You will submit up to
ten stories for publication in the newspaper by the late afternoon, which
might later be ‘shovelled’ onto the news website. You love your job, but
you’ve heard a lot of worrying things about the future of newspapers.
Cadetship entry to the newspaper has been slashed this year, new jobs
are scarce and the future of classified and commercial advertising revenue
looks uncertain. A lot of journalists are talking about re-skilling or mov-
ing on to professional communication roles, and overall the industry is
feeling the tension of an uncertain future.
Now fast-forward 20 years to 2017.
Your typical workday as a journalist starts the moment you wake up.
You check your smartphone, clicking immediately on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram and Snapchat to look at a mix of personal and media-related
profiles. Over breakfast, you check content that has already been posted
by your news organisation and compare it with what is trending. You
post a few comments on your personal Twitter profile, which has 1000
followers. Then you switch to your separate professional Twitter pro-
file, which has 8000 followers, and share a few links to your media
© The Author(s) 2017 1
D. Bossio, Journalism and Social Media,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65472-0_1