Social Media as Newsbeats in the Czech Republic

The next speakers at ECREA 2014 are Vadim Hladík and Vaclav Štetka, whose interest is in the intersections of social media and journalism in the Czech Republic. What has emerged is a hybrid media system, impacting on organisational setups and routines; on the use of social media as sources (with distinct patterns during breaking news and everyday routine, respectively); and on intermedia agenda-setting processes.

Twitter, for example, has become a kind of newsbeat for journalism: a rich and easy resource for news content, and a tool that allows sources to maintain better control of their messages, as tweets are usually quoted in full. But current research focusses mainly on Western contexts, and on Twitter; the present study therefore explores social media more broadly for the Czech context.

The focus here is to explore the salience and use of social media as news sources for mainstream news reporting; the study identified the citation of social media content in news articles published by a selection of Czech news media. 58% of articles used social media as sources; another sizeable category talked about social media more generally.

Facebook led, but Twitter was represented more strongly than its market share in the country would explain, and textual rather than electronic media were more active in sourcing information from social media. Tabloid media focussed more strongly on visual content than their high-brow counterparts, including on YouTube content. Sports, crime, politics, and celebrity news categories were most prominent; Facebook was used mainly for domestic stories, while Twitter led for foreign stories. Vox pops from social media appeared almost exclusively in crime stories.

Social media remain in a secondary role as news sources, then; an average of 2.3 articles per day reference social media in the most social media-affine news site, but this dropped off for less active news organisations.