ICA 2016

Journalistic Branding on Twitter: An Exploratory Study of Australian Journalists

Folker Hanusch and Axel Bruns

• 9-13 June 2016 – International Communication Association conference, Fukuoka, Japan

While journalism scholarship on Twitter has expanded significantly in recent years, journalists’ use of the social networking platform for self-promotion and branding has only recently received attention. Yet, as Twitter is becoming important for journalists to build economic and social capital, journalistic branding is becoming increasingly relevant to study. This paper reports the results from a study of 4189 Australian journalists’ Twitter accounts to examine their level of activity and approaches to self-presentation in their profile information. Journalists are relatively active Twitter users who tweet on a regular basis, but they still portray a predominantly professional persona that is closely tied to their employer. Less than half also provide personal information about themselves. Whereas only small differences could be found along gender lines, more significant differences existed in terms of whether journalists worked in metropolitan or regional areas and what their employers’ main platform of distribution was.