Social Media Sourcing Practices: How Dutch Newspapers Use Tweets in Political News Coverage

Abstract

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Social media analytics: analysis and visualisation of news diffusion using NodeXL

“…It is not surprising, therefore, that tweets in themselves have become to appear on television and television news (Lefky et al, 2015) and also within newspapers as direct sources of information in themselves (Brands et al, 2018).…”

Populist Twitter Posts in News Stories

“…The free float of easily accessible first-hand information on Twitter has also become an attractive source for journalists, who are operating under financial constraints and time pressure (Lewis, Williams, and Franklin 2008;Schmuck et al 2017). In this context, journalists have been increasingly drawing on information from Twitter in their TV news (Cameron and Geidner 2014;Moon and Hadley 2014), printed news (Brands, Graham, and Broersma 2018;Broersma and Graham 2013;Moon and Hadley 2014;Paulussen and Harder 2014), and online news coverage (Bane 2017;Lecheler and Kruikemeier 2016). Broersma and Graham have shown that journalists frequently use Twitter posts of political actors and directly embed such posts into news stories to "illustrate news events" (2013,450) and "to add flavour to a story" (2013,450).…”

“…Recent research indicates that journalists seem to be especially prone to embed Twitter posts from right-wing populist actors in their coverage. The reason might be that such posts contain provocative statements, grabbing people's attention and thus contributing to the commercial strategies of news organizations (Brands, Graham, and Broersma 2018).…”

“…Although previous research has acknowledged the important role of embedding Twitter posts in news stories (e.g., Bane 2017;Brands, Graham, and Broersma 2018), the impact of this practice has not been systematically examined and thus remains largely unclear. More specifically, we have identified three research gaps.…”

“…More specifically, we have identified three research gaps. First, we generally lack research on new hybrid types of media coverage, especially how social media content in regular news may affect citizens' attitudes (Brands, Graham, and Broersma 2018). Second, we lack experimental designs to study right-wing populists' use of social media (Hameleers and Schmuck 2017).…”