The Promoter, Celebrity, and Joker Roles in Journalists’ Social Media Performance

Abstract

One of the main challenges of studying journalistic roles in social media practice is that the profession’s conceptual boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Social media has developed as a space used by audiences to consume, share, and discuss news and information, offering novel locations for journalists to intervene at professional and personal levels and in private and public spheres. This article takes the “journalistic ego” domain as its starting point to examine how journalists perform three specific roles on social media: the promoter, the celebrity, and the joker. To investigate these roles in journalistic performance, the article situates their emergence and operationalization in a broader epistemological context, examining how journalists engage with, contest, and/or diverge from different professional norms and practices, as well as the conflict between traditional and social media-specific roles of journalists.

Blurring Boundaries Between Journalists and Tiktokers: Journalistic Role Performance on TikTok

“…The use of social networks has become standardized for media and journalists, forcing them to build new rules and patterns of use adapted to the logic of these platforms (Mellado & Hermida, 2021). Social media has changed the way news is produced and how content is disseminated as well as interactions with the audience (Hermida, 2016;Hermida et al, 2012;Newman, 2011;Newman et al, 2013).…”

“…The capacity for self-identity and self-expression in social networks results, according to Mellado and Hermida (2021), in "novel" roles for journalists. The authors differentiate between the promoter role (characterized by personal and professional branding, promotion of content, products, and services), the celebrity role (when fame is sought through exposure, association, and personal branding), and the joker role (when the aim is to be deliberately funny and humor is used to comment on the work and its routines, or to make jokes about oneself).…”

A Conceptual Framework for Journalistic Identity on Social Media: How the Personal and Professional Contribute to Power and Profit

“…Given the tension when news takes place in a myriad of ways and forms outside of the institutional logic of traditional journalism (Lewis 2012;Hermida 2016), both the industry and scholarly work have focussed on what Lewis and Molyneux describe as a "narrative of normalization" (Lewis and Molyneux 2018, 14), concerned about how the journalism profession has either imposed traditional norms on social media or adopted new norms and practices. These range from normative standards such as objectivity to strategies to maintain editorial independence from commercial interests, with studies pointing to journalists marketing their editorial work on social media (Mellado and Hermida 2021;Tandoc and Vos 2016). Starting from there, it is possible to deduce that professional norms are not necessarily the same across all media logics and do not translate into the same identity construction.…”

How Chilean Journalists Use Social Media: Digital Transformation and New Forms of Visibility and Identity Creation

“…As noted in the Results section, business accounts allow users to access advanced metrics, which means that they can gather data on the effectiveness of their posts. Our data reflects that only 8.8 % of the journalists with an active Instagram account use such tools, and most of them work on television and the radio, suggesting that roles such as promoter or celebrity are emerging in journalistic practices in this platform (Mellado & Hermida, 2021).…”

“…Accordingly, scholars have begun to theoretically explore the functionalities associated with the affordances of each platform, as they shape both how news professionals use their social media accounts and the content they create in terms of aesthetics, genre conventions, rhetorical practices, interactive mechanisms, and the emergence of new professional roles (Hermida & Mellado, 2020;Mellado & Hermida, 2021).…”