Election Night Broadcasts and the Hybrid Media System: A Case Study of Australia

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of broadcast election night coverage, contemporaneous social media data, and semi-structured interviews focused on the 2018 Victorian state election to assess the extent and nature of media hybridity that occurred. This work contributes to the field by providing the first analysis of the hybrid media system using a case study event in Australia, the first study of a second-order election, and by focusing in detail on how journalistic processes and decisions shape hybridity and how these are, themselves, shaped by hybrid logics. It finds some evidence of hybrid norms and actions, but in other ways coverage followed traditional media logics.

Media events in an age of “cross-media”: a smartphone diary app study

“…The increasingly widespread use of social media like Facebook and Twitter has changed how news is produced, disseminated, and discussed, in what Chadwick (2017) defines as “hybrid media system”, where amateur and non-elite actors contest and interrogate news narratives as they occur, and intervene in political information cycles (Beratis and Wright, 2022). Rather than using broadcast and digital media separately, actors in hybrid media systems are increasingly attentive to the different opportunities offered by different media and use them simultaneously to “create, tap, or steer information flows” (Chadwick, 2017, p. 4).…”