Twitter-Based Interactions between Norwegian Journalists and Politicians

The next ECREA 2014 speaker is my Norwegian project partner Eli Skogerbø, whose interest is in the connections between journalists and politicians on Twitter. How do journalists connect with politicians on Twitter; how do politicians respond to being approached on Twitter?

The project focussed especially on the timeframe around the 2013 Norwegian election. During this time, journalists' activities varied widely; one political journalist was very highly active (producing some 9,000 tweets over the course of one year), while the average level of Twitter activity across journalists was a great deal lower.

For the most part, the journalists' interactions with politicians are quite limited; some journalists and politicians engage quite closely, while for most others there are very few interactions. Also, where there are connections between journalists and politicians, these largely take the form of passing @mentions of politicians' accounts rather than actual conversations. This may be done to alert politicians to being talked about, and to enable them to respond if they so choose, so it can perhaps be understood as a form of source management.

There are also some differences between journalists regarding their role perceptions and activities, however; more activist journalists take a somewhat different approach to tweeting. Politicians largely chose not to engage, other than in a few exceptional cases.