Social media today are playing a more important role as a news source than ever before. Yet, there have been no longitudinal studies on journalists' sourcing practices in recent years that allow us to consider the mechanisms of innovation diffusion. Comparative studies of different social platforms in different media systems are just as rare. We therefore examine the use of Facebook and Twitter as journalistic sources in newspapers of three countries. A main finding is that, after a period of stagnation at the beginning of this decade, the use of social media sources has resurged massively in recent years. The patterns of this second rise of social media in journalism are almost identical in the analyzed newspapers. A comparison of the platforms has shown that Twitter is more commonly used as a news source than Facebook. Compared to Facebook, Twitter is primarily used as an elite channel. An unsupervised topic clustering approach (LDA) also revealed that the issues on which social media are sourced and the quantities of social media references are similar in The New York Times and The Guardian. In S€ uddeutsche Zeitung, however, journalists source social media considerably less, and in different thematic contexts.

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Recent reports show that users increasingly use smartphone messenger applications such as WhatsApp for news. Media outlets have started to provide news via WhatsApp in addition to other platforms. In journalism scholarship, the routines of messenger app journalism are still little understood. Building on the Diffusions of Innovations theory, this paper explores whether newsrooms treat WhatsApp similar to other social media, which they have used for a longer period of time, or whether they have developed new practices that respect WhatsApp's roots in mobile and interpersonal communication. Focusing on Germany as a case study and drawing on an analysis of 3745 messages sent to WhatsApp channels of news outlets and on an online survey of journalists working with social media (N ¼ 111), this study shows that journalists utilize the innovative possibilities of WhatsApp for news to a varying degree. While some characteristics of mobile communication are considered in news outlets' strategies, engagement with the audience is often neglected. The results highlight the challenges for relational innovations in the editorial process.

To capture audiences' attention on social media, news outlets may disseminate journalistic content in line with platform instead of mass media logics, indicating a platformization of news. Taking a cross-platform, multi-modal approach, we analyze how German outlets select and adapt existing stories for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. We combine a computational and a manual content analysis of articles and social media posts (N ¼ 4,412), including related images/videos (N ¼ 6,850). Overall, evidence for outlets following platform logics on social media is limited: News outlets select and adapt news on a technical level, for instance by distributing more content on news-centered platforms like Twitter or by fostering on-platform engagement by excluding external links on Instagram. However, they do not systematically select or adapt news on a more communicative level, for instance by preferring specific topics for social media or by using more engaging language on platforms.

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Wir stellen in diesem Aufsatz ein Modell interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kommunikationswissenschaft und Methodenwissenschaft (hier: Statistik) vor. Dabei steht die Frage im Mittelpunkt, wie sich die Kollaboration grundverschiedener Disziplinen über einen längeren Zeitraum verstetigen lässt. Der agilen Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware, die die fachübergreifende Zusammenarbeit strukturiert, kann hierbei eine zentrale Rolle zukommen. Sie ermöglicht zwei Ebenen der Zusammenarbeit mit verschiedenen Zeithorizonten: auf der einen werden zeitlich begrenzte Projekte umgesetzt, auf der anderen die längerfristige Zusammenarbeit organisiert. Wechselnde Team-Konstellationen und Hierarchien ermöglichen kontinuierlichen Wissensaustausch, die verwendete Programmiersprache ist Grundlage für die Entstehung einer fächerübergreifenden Kommunikation und die Orientierung auf ein gemeinsames Produkt schafft eine Kultur der gemeinsamen Verantwortlichkeit. Um die theoretischen Reflexionen an der Forschungspraxis zu spiegeln, greifen die Autor*innen auf ihre Erfahrungen im Kontext des Dortmund Center für datenbasierte Medien-Analyse (kurz: DoCMA) zurück. DoCMA ist deswegen als Fallbeispiel relevant, da Struktur und Organisation hier auf die Erfordernisse der agilen Entwicklung offener Forschungssoftware ausgerichtet wurden.

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