Twitter Usage Patterns by Finnish News Outlets and Journalists

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2018 session is Mikko Villi, whose interest is in the reserve of news media journalists on Twitter. There are already a number of studies of journalists’ use of the platform; the present paper focusses especially on Finnish news media and journalists, however.

One key question here is whether such uses are still following mass media logics, or embrace the logics of social media platforms. But the distinction between the two is a simplification, of course; in reality there are sliding transitions between the two, and Twitter’s broadcast-style model of message distribution is itself somewhat influenced by mass media logics, perhaps.

Twitter may be used by journalists for a variety of purposes; some of this use is on-directional while other uses are about engaging more interactively with other users. The present study captured a small sample of tweets by news organisations and journalists, and coded their content based on tweeting styles and practices, as well as the responses to these tweets.

Journalists received significantly more likes, retweets, and comments for their tweets than media organisations; this seems to indicate much greater interactivity around their content. Journalists also engaged substantially in conversation with others, as well as in self-branding, while news organisation accounts were almost exclusively only sharing their content. In the case of journalists, therefore, a personalised social media logic seems to be fairly prevalent, while news organisations still follow much more of a mass media logic; in combination, news outlets and news workers embrace a hybrid logic, therefore.