Twitter Interaction Patterns of Leading Australian, German, and U.K. Political Journalists

Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.

We focus here on Australia, Germany, and the U.K., which present useful differences in terms of population size, social media take-up (which remains comparatively low in Germany, in particular), and media system structures (including media ownership concentration and the role of public service media). For this study we focussed on political journalists belonging to the respective national press corps accredited at the parliaments in in each country; working with the official membership lists for each press corps, we identified journalists’ Twitter accounts if available, and tracked their own tweets as well as any public @mentions and retweets directed at these accounts using the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit since 2016. For the present paper, we focus on the data from 2017.

Germany political journalists posted an average of 1.7 tweets per day; Australians 4.1 tweets; and British journalists 6.6 tweets. The medians for these groups also differ considerably, however. This means that although Germany has more Bundespressekonferenz members, the Australian and U.K. press galleries produced considerably more tweets in total over the course of the year. In Germany, the top decile of active members contributed some 62% to this volume, while in Australia 50% and in the U.K. only 44% of tweets were produced by this most active decile.

German journalists also receive fewer mentions by a smaller number of third-party accounts in return, as a result (3.9 per day); in spite of their smaller population sizes, Australian (22.9) and U.K. (77) journalists are mentioned far more frequently by ordinary Twitter users. For Germany, we further explored what accounts are mentioned by journalists on Twitter; some 27% of them said they interact frequently with journalists, and many of them self-reported as male and right-wing (the response rate for this survey was very low, however).

Journalists themselves do frequently mention other accounts, and the networks of the most regular interactants (engaging at least 10 times over the course of the year) include some 2,200 accounts for U.K. and 1,300 accounts fro German and Australian journalists. These networks are relatively dispersed for Germany and the U.K., while the Australian network is considerably more dense – perhaps, I would suggest – as a result of the relative isolation of the Canberra press gallery in Australia’s ‘bush capital’ that may encourage a greater sense of group identity, compared with the considerably more vibrant cities of Berlin and London. In Germany, further coding has shown that journalists mainly interact with other journalists and politicians on Twitter; we have not yet conducted such an analysis for the other countries.