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Part of
Participation, Engagement and Collaboration in Newsmaking: A postfoundational perspective
Edited by Jana Declercq, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Astrid Vandendaele
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 94] 2021
► pp. 151–174

Chapter 7
Journalists’ use of social media

A paradigmatic shift towards restoring audience trust through wide-ranging engagement

This paper shows that journalists are gradually taking greater advantage of social media and the interactional affordances it offers. This means, firstly, that journalists can benefit from social media not only by monitoring conversations, but also by participating in and initiating them. Secondly, journalists can not only collect information and identify sources, but also actively ask for them. Thirdly, journalists can not only distribute their work, but also market it and brand themselves. As these interactional extensions enable journalists to already engage with their audience during the newswriting, the paper concludes by discussing the potential of social media for improving the transparency of journalistic work and, therefore, for restoring a trusting relationship between the news media and their audience.

Keywords: social media, journalistic work, newswriting, paradigmatic shift, engagement, transparency, trust in journalism
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Social media: Scalable sociality of media
  • Literature review: A patchy picture of journalists’ social media use
  • Data and methods: Theoretical sampling of Finnish journalists’ practices
  • Results: Towards a paradigmatic shift in newswriting
  • Discussion: Restoring trust through transparency of practices
  • Conclusion: Social media is (becoming) an integral part of today’s journalism
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.94.c7
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