The final paper in this ECREA 2016 session is by Christian Nuernbergk, whose focus is on the interaction of political and journalistic actors via social media. Both now have to deal with emerging personal publics in social media, in addition to their conventional mass media publics; they now need to have in mind a range of such publics in their everyday professional practice.

It is no surprise that politicians' social media activities now also shape journalistic coverage, then. Journalists research background information and track politicians' activities using Facebook and (especially) Twitter; and these platforms are perceived as increasingly important …

The next paper at ECREA 2016 is presented by Christoph Neuberger, whose focus is on the dynamic relationship between journalism and its audiences. He points out that the complexity of communication has increased with the range of options for communication that have now emerged in online contexts.

There are three main causes for this: first, journalism is now a thoroughly multichannel form of communication, involving conventional offline and online media as well as social media channels that operate in parallel. Second, social media, in particular, are multifunctional, and journalists as well as ordinary users are using them for a variety …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is the great Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Blockupy Frankfurt protests, directed against the inauguration of the new European Central Bank building. These protests used social media as a central means of generating engagement and activity.

The movement used a number of key hashtags (#blockupy, #destroika, #notroika) to mobilise its supporters; tweets in these hashtags largely consisted of retweets of a number of key messages. It is notable that there are a comparatively limited amount of URLs in these tweets, however, positioning these hashtags outside of common patterns.

Interestingly, the …

I'm afraid my blogging app decided to delete my notes on the next presentation at ECREA 2016, so we're moving on directly to the paper by Mireille Lalancette, whose interest is in the role of social media in Canadian politics. Québec experienced a major student strike during the first half of 2012, protesting against an increase in tuition fees but also linking with a number of other social issues.

The present research focusses on the protest repertoires used by these protesters, combining both online and offline components. Twitter serves the purpose of ambient political engagement in this context, connecting …

The second morning at ECREA 2016 starts with Laura Pérez-Altable, whose focus is on the Arab Spring in Tunisia. She begins by pointing out the double articulation of social media as a material object as well as as symbolic and discursive; this also goes for the social networks that are encoded in social media environments.

The present study focusses on Nawaat, an independent collective blog; Laura examined the site's ego-network during both the latent and visible phases of the Tunisian social movement. This combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of social network analysis and direct interviews with Tunisian activists.

The …

The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is Stefan Stieglitz, whose focus is on the tweeting activities of German journalists. The study understands the public sphere as defined by a triadic influence structure involving official spokespeople, journalists, and ordinary citizens; in a traditional model the information from spokespeople would be filtered and gatekept by journalists before it reaches the general public, but this is no longer necessarily the case in a social media context. Participation, interaction, and – through this – also transparency may be considerably enhanced by these changes. The question then becomes how journalistic norms continue to operate in …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Radim Hladík, who shifts our focus to the Twitterisation of Czech news. He begins by noting the fact that journalism now exists in a hybrid media system where old and new media meet and interact in a variety of ways; just how these interactions take place is not necessarily clear or predictable, however. In particular, there are questions about intermedia agenda-setting dynamics between conventional and social media, exploring how online sources are used to complement or supplant conventional sources.

Longitudinal studies that examine changes in sourcing practices, in particular, remain largely …

The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde, whose focus is on journalists' activities on Twitter. The platform has now been widely adopted by news organisations, and journalists are under considerable pressure to use it to break news, disseminate content, and engage with peers and audiences. None of these pressures are inherently new, but Twitter enables new approaches to engaging in these practices.

Svenja interviewed some 26 journalists in the United States, with a majority aged 44 or below. These reported that there are now often explicit social media policies that mandate the use of social media, and …