The final paper in this ECREA 2016 session is by Christian Nuernbergk, whose focus is on the interaction of political and journalistic actors via social media. Both now have to deal with emerging personal publics in social media, in addition to their conventional mass media publics; they now need to have in mind a range of such publics in their everyday professional practice.

It is no surprise that politicians' social media activities now also shape journalistic coverage, then. Journalists research background information and track politicians' activities using Facebook and (especially) Twitter; and these platforms are perceived as increasingly important …

The next paper at ECREA 2016 is presented by Christoph Neuberger, whose focus is on the dynamic relationship between journalism and its audiences. He points out that the complexity of communication has increased with the range of options for communication that have now emerged in online contexts.

There are three main causes for this: first, journalism is now a thoroughly multichannel form of communication, involving conventional offline and online media as well as social media channels that operate in parallel. Second, social media, in particular, are multifunctional, and journalists as well as ordinary users are using them for a variety …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is the great Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Blockupy Frankfurt protests, directed against the inauguration of the new European Central Bank building. These protests used social media as a central means of generating engagement and activity.

The movement used a number of key hashtags (#blockupy, #destroika, #notroika) to mobilise its supporters; tweets in these hashtags largely consisted of retweets of a number of key messages. It is notable that there are a comparatively limited amount of URLs in these tweets, however, positioning these hashtags outside of common patterns.

Interestingly, the …

I'm afraid my blogging app decided to delete my notes on the next presentation at ECREA 2016, so we're moving on directly to the paper by Mireille Lalancette, whose interest is in the role of social media in Canadian politics. Québec experienced a major student strike during the first half of 2012, protesting against an increase in tuition fees but also linking with a number of other social issues.

The present research focusses on the protest repertoires used by these protesters, combining both online and offline components. Twitter serves the purpose of ambient political engagement in this context, connecting …