The Impact of Platform Affordances on Journalistic Role Performance

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Claudia Mellado, whose interest is in the impact of Twitter and Instagram on journalistic performance. Such platforms are now widely adopted in journalistic practice, and this can be understood as a hybrid normalisation that blends mainstream and social media logics.

But various assumptions, biases, and blind spots may have crept into this research, and the present project therefore focussed on two key platforms to understand how they affect journalistic role performance: how do the structure, culture, and historical context of the news media intersect with these new spaces?

Various elements of journalistic practice are evaluated by normative criteria, but these do not necessarily translate well across media forms; they are themselves affected by the logics and affordances of those media. The stages of Twitter and Instagram require different forms of social presence and self-representation, for instance.

This can be broken down into the dimensions of aesthetics, genre conventions, rhetorical practices, structure and design, and interaction and intentionality in journalistic presence and role performance. These are different for the different platforms, of course – Twitter remains more text-focussed while Instagram is more visual, and embedded images are displayed in different styles and orientations on the two platforms.

The same applies to rhetorical practices (where message lengths and engagement styles affect presentation); structure and design (where in-built platform affordances play a particularly significant role); and interaction and intentionality (where the different platforms offer diverging tools for engagement between users).

The plan now is to apply this analytical framework to a sample of Chilean journalists’ social media accounts.