The Intersections between Mainstream and Social Media in Flemish News

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

We should therefore look at the interactions between platforms, actors, and time in the news process, but for empirical studies this is methodologically very difficult. Steve’s project captured the news articles on five Flemish media platforms, including print, radio, TV, the Web, and Twitter, and within them coded for the actors who participated in the news-making process; for these stories, it also sought to examine the timelines of how the stories broke and became popularised. Media platforms clearly still matter in this, but some 42% of all stories first broke on Twitter, with 29% on news sites and 18% in print newspapers; news outlets and their journalists play a considerable role in pushing stories out via Twitter, in fact. Major news stories with a longer lifespan often originated via mainstream media, however.

Intermedia actors also play an important role here: politicians and parties as well as journalists and media outlets dominate the initial dissemination of stories. This also enables them to engage in a certain amount of real-time spin: in sharing and reacting to emerging news stories, politicians and other news actors are able to frame and reframe these stories and to influence their flow; this happens both through social and mainstream media. Each media platform, in fact, has its own temporal affordances and contributes differently to this process.