Twitter has become one of the most important online spaces for political communication practice and research. Through a hand-coded content analysis, this study compares how British and Dutch Parliamentary candidates used Twitter during the 2010 general elections. We found that Dutch politicians were more likely to use Twitter than UK candidates and on average tweeted over twice as much as their British counterparts. Dutch candidates were also more likely to embrace the interactive potential of Twitter, and it appeared that the public responded to this by engaging in further dialogue. We attribute the more conservative approach of British candidates compared to the Netherlands to historic differences in the appropriation of social media by national elites, and differing levels of discipline imposed from the central party machines.

Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting withTwitter particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n=26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n=416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, we show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication.However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.

No abstract

No abstract

Social media are increasingly embedded into everyday communication. This challenges journalism to anticipate the changes that social media trigger in the use and production of (news) media. In this paper, we focus on personal branding on Twitter. Journalists are increasingly encouraged to develop a personal brand on Twitter. This offers them the opportunity to become news and opinion hubs and to increase their "market value". Erving Goffman's theatre metaphor is used as an analytical framework in which journalists are conceptualized as performers who are acting on a stage in front of an audience. Through a quantitative content analysis of the tweeting behaviour of 40 employed and freelance journalists, we explore the way they use social media to present themselves and which dilemma's they are facing. We analyse tweeting behaviour in terms of the types of tweets, functions of tweets and modes of interaction. The quantitative content analysis is supplemented with in-depth interviews with 12 journalists, in order to analyse the reasoning behind their social media habits. Our findings show that journalists particularly struggle with being factual or opinionated, being personal or professional, how to balance broadcasting their message with engagement and how to promote themselves strategically.

News has traditionally served as a common ground, enabling people to connect to others and engage with the public issues they encounter in everyday life. This article revisits these theoretical debates about mediated public connection within the context of a digitalized news media landscape. While academic discussions surrounding these shifts are often explored in terms of normative ideals ascribed to political systems or civic cultures, we propose to reposition the debate by departing from the practices and preferences of the news user instead. Therefore, we deconstruct and translate the concept of public connection into four dimensions that emphasize people’s lived experiences: inclusiveness, engagement, relevance, and constructiveness. Situating these in an everyday life framework, this article advances a user-based perspective that considers the role of news for people in digital societies. Accordingly, it offers a conceptual framework that aims to encapsulate how news becomes meaningful, rather than why it should be.

The current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of digital outlets and increased opportunities for users to navigate news themselves. Yet, it is still unclear how people negotiate this fluctuating environment to decide which news media to select or ignore, how they assemble distinctive cross-media repertoires, and what makes these compositions meaningful. This article analyzes the value of different platforms, genres, and practices in everyday life by mapping patterns of cross-media news use. Combining Q methodology with think-aloud protocols and day-in-the-life-interviews, five distinct news media repertoires are identified: (1) regionally oriented, (2) background oriented, (3) digital, (4) laid-back, and (5) nationally oriented news use. Our findings indicate that users do not always use what they prefer, nor do they prefer what they use. Moreover, the boundaries they draw between news and other information are clearly shifting. Finally, our results show that in a world with a wide range of possibilities to consume news for free, paying for news can be considered an act of civic engagement. We argue that perceived news use and users' appreciation of news should be studied in relation to each other to gain a fuller understanding of what news consumption entails in this rapidly changing media landscape.KEYWORDS audience studies; cross-media; digitalization; everyday life; media repertoires; news use; Q methodology; value IntroductionThe current news media landscape is characterized by an abundance of information. Not only has digitalization resulted in a proliferation of available news sources, people now have more power to navigate the news content they want to use, when, where, and how. Therefore, news users increasingly choose their own trajectories across the media landscape and follow the news on multiple media platforms (Picone, Courtois, and Paulussen 2014). Previous studies have tried to map these changes in several ways. One possible avenue measures actual news use, employing quantitative measures such as Web metrics analyses to track news users' clicking behavior (e.g. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013) and surveys to map self-declared usage rates (e.g. Mitchell, Holcomb, and Page 2013;Newman, Levy, and Nielsen 2015;Yuan 2011). Such studies address questions about which news outlets are most frequently used or on what stories users spend the most time. A second strand of research considers shifting user preferences, typically employing qualitative methods including interviews and focus groups to uncover the importance of news in users' everyday lives (e.g. Van Cauwenberge, d'Haenens, and Beentjes 2013;Zerba 2011 Both lines of research then try to establish claims about what current news consumption looks like. However, by focusing on either patterns of perceived news media use or the perceived importance of platforms and outlets, one might not be able to grasp the complexity of news use. For instance, Chyi and Lee (2013) found that online newspaper users might actually prefer the print...

This article analyzes the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brown—set up during the 2014 Ferguson protests—in order to rethink the role of memory work within contemporary digital activism. We argue that, as a particular type of discursive practice, memory work on the page bridged personal and collective action frames. This occurred in four overlapping ways. First, the page allowed for affective commemorative engagement that helped shape Brown’s public image. Second, Brown’s death was contextualized as part of systematic injustice against African Americans. Third, the past was used to legitimize present action, wherein the present was continually connected to the past and future. And fourth, particular discursive units became recognizable symbolic markers during the protests and for future recall. Based on this typology, we show that memory work, although multidirectional and in flux, is stabilized by the interactions between the page administrator, users, and Facebook’s operational logic.