Mainstream and Non-Mainstream Journalists on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Election

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media such as Twitter during the 2016 U.S. election, then? Non-mainstream journalists were much more willing to use retweets and quoted tweets, also to engage with ordinary, non-media users and suspicious (bot, fake) accounts. Mainstream journalists also overwhelmingly linked to their own or their colleagues’ work, while non-mainstream journalists also linked to other media outlets and other outside sources. This points to different gatekeeping practices, of course.

Mainstream journalists also framed the election contest more frequently as a contest, while opinion and humour were more prominent amongst non-mainstream journalists. Non-mainstreamers were a great deal more negative about Hillary Clinton, but often also about Donald Trump, and this might have been an attempt to appear like more powerful, hard-hitting watchdog reporters. Mainstream reporters were more strongly critical of Trump.

But this is just a momentary observation – we are in a period of chaos, and these trends need to be observed over a much longer period to examine the general patterns.