The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde, whose focus is on journalists' activities on Twitter. The platform has now been widely adopted by news organisations, and journalists are under considerable pressure to use it to break news, disseminate content, and engage with peers and audiences. None of these pressures are inherently new, but Twitter enables new approaches to engaging in these practices.
Svenja interviewed some 26 journalists in the United States, with a majority aged 44 or below. These reported that there are now often explicit social media policies that mandate the use of social media, and …
Up next at ECREA 2016 are Oliver Hahn and Isabelle Brodeßer, whose interest is in the emergence of social media editors in German TV newsrooms. Such editors do not generate content, but are tasked with identifying user-generated content on social media that can be introduced into the broadcast news coverage. But there are problems here with verification, as well as with the identification of the original authors of such content, both of which are very important in news contexts.
Right now there is no adequate definition of this role, however; the job title itself may also vary considerably. What characterises …
The afternoon session at ECREA 2016 starts with a paper by Gunilla Hultén. She presents Storylab, a collaborative project with Svenska Dagbladet, one of the major daily newspapers in Sweden. This brought together journalism and computer science students and their educators with journalists and editors at the newspaper.
The media industry in Sweden is experiencing rapid changes, much as such industries are doing around the world. In addition to many challenges, new technologies are also creating new opportunities for journalistic storytelling; to realise these, it is necessary to bring together journalists and developers even while they are still in …
The final speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Darren Lilleker, whose focus is also on Instagram. On the platform, politics has become part of a suite of everyday uses, and this also points to the everyday dimension of political discussion. Some of this may be part of narcissistic self-promotion, but much is also about the social mediation of everyday life.
The focus of the present study is on the Romanian election in 2014: the election has two rounds of voting, and the Romanian diaspora around Europe felt that it was restricted from participating in the election by the …
The next speaker at ECREA 2016 is the great Anders Larsson, whose interest is in the use of Twitter and Instagram in the 2015 Norwegian regional elections. Instagram in particular has ben underresearched to date, especially given its substantial userbase and its ability to attract younger audiences. The underlying assumption here is that smaller parties may be early movers on these platforms, and that such uses are gradually normalised with the adoption by the major parties; this has already been observed for the case of Twitter in Norway.
Data collection here was via TCAT for Twitter, and instaR for …
Up next at ECREA 2016 are Jakob Svensson and Uta Russmann, whose focus is on the use of Instagram in the 2014 Swedish elections, especially by Swedish parties. Instagram is interesting in that it privileges the visual dimension that tends to be underresearched in political communications research. The images that are posted here may be more effective than mere text messages in gaining voters' attention, and are possibly also able to be more persuasive; additionally, Instagram can combine images and text, which may be even more effective.
The focus here is on the use of the platform for mobilisation, image …
The next session at ECREA 2016 starts with Eli Skogerbø, whose interest is in the personalisation of political campaigning through social media. But what do we mean by this term? What are the dynamics of personalisation across different party-political systems?
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Social media give politicians an independent, unedited arena for communicating politics. Individual politicians can use such platforms for getting more direct attention, at the expense of their groups or parties. The same is true in political journalism, however, where there is also a growing focus on individual politicians over their parties – so the idea of personalisation has been …
The final speakers in this ECREA 2016 session are my QUT colleague Brenda Moon and I, presenting our comparative analysis of the uses of Twitter in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election. Below is our presentation:
The next speaker in this ECREA 2016 session is Martin Nkosi Ndlela, who is also a contributor to our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. He shifts our focus to the use of social media in Kenyan elections. What are the democratic implications of rapid change in media systems in developing nations such as this, and what effect do new media have on civic engagement?
How were social media used in the political campaigning process in the 2013 election campaign in Kenya, then? This must also be understood against the context of previous elections in the country, which …
The first morning at ECREA 2016 starts with a session that celebrates the launch of our Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, and begins with a paper by my co-editor Gunn Enli. Her interest is in the question of authenticity: this has become a big theme in advertising for just about any product or service, also including politics. This may be seen as a response to the artificial aspects of the postmodern world.
The more artificial ands focus group-tested political messaging becomes, the more the idea of authenticity has come to the fore. Such authenticity has been approached …
