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This article examines how Members of the German Bundestag (MdBs) used Twitter in the context of the country's 2013 federal elections. In particular, we explore the dynamics in the MdBs' use of Twitter during different periods of the electoral term: How do the tweeting habits of MdBs differ by party before and during the election campaign in (a) public versus personal communication and (b) campaign versus policy messages? How are the selection of interaction partners, centralization on leading actors, and reciprocity of the MdBs' Twitter networks affected by election campaigning? We address these questions by conducting a content analysis combined with a network analysis of interaction patterns. The comparative application of both methods explains the differences of MdBs' networks. The comparison clearly exhibits election campaign-driven changes related to the amount of activity and the character of tweeted messages. During the campaign period, MdBs' tweets clearly discussed specific policies less than before. Tweeting about one's personal life occurred also less frequently in the final campaign stage. Instead, the MdBs mainly complement other forms of election campaigning through a vivid metacommunication on campaign developments. Network relations reflect these variations and were less often reciprocated in proximity to the election and showed a higher degree of group homophily. We also found a substantial representation of print and broadcast media actors in the examined @reply networks. It is likely that these interactions and conversations with journalists are part of an MdB's individual performance of "news management."

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.

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