I am the final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session, presenting a paper co-authored with Christian Nuernbergk and Aljosha Karim Schapals, my colleagues in the Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project. Here are our slides:

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

For the user, this manifests in multiple server calls as they access the media organisation’s content; in addition to the media organisation, their devices also access various content elements from a range of other platforms. This is not …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

That relationship is also based on certain normative aspects – seeing journalists as watchdogs on behalf of citizens, for instance. But such norms are themselves founded in mutually accepted values, and the societal consensus that governs those values may be breaking down. Indeed, we may no longer be able to …

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …

The next speaker in this ICA session is Ulrika Hedman, who shifts our focus to journalistic self-presentation on Twitter, and especially to the extent to which they provide personal and private information in their social media profiles.

The need to provide such personal and private information shows an adoption of social media logics by journalists, shifting away from conventional news media logic. Such social media logics demand that journalists should personalise their activities and portray a more rounded, multifaceted public persona.

Ulrika’s study examined the Twitter profiles of some 2000+ Swedish journalists in 2014 and 2017, and found that …

I’m on one of my rare visits to ICA, and at a journalism session that starts with my colleague Folker Hanusch. He points out the considerable offline homophily between journalists - they hang out and interact with each other, and this may also translate to an online context. Some of this also intersects with news organisations, news beats, gender, and other identity traits, however – and on specific platforms, of course, homophily may also result in different patterns for different forms of interaction (e.g. @mentions vs. retweets on Twitter).

This study worked with the Australian TrISMA infrastructure and …