Paper by Axel Bruns, Christian Nuernbergk, and Aljosha Karim Schapals presented at the Social Media & Society conference, Copenhagen, 20 July 2018.

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Social Media & Society, Copenhagen, 20 July 2018
Axel Bruns, Christian Nuernbergk, Aljosha Karim Schapals
Queensland University of Technology / University of Trier
What Journalists Share
A Comparative Study of the National Press Corps in Australia and Germany

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Journalists and Social Media
● Gradual adoption:
● Cautious and reluctant at first
● Growing acceptance after major events
● Point of professional distinction for younger journalists
● Personal branding and professional innovation
● Questions remain:
● Diverging social media guidelines by news organisations
● Distinction between journalists and news brands
● Engagement with other journalists and audiences

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New York Times: ORF (Austria):
New York Times Guidelines
Austrian Discussion: ORF and Twitter

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News Sharing by Journalists
● What do journalists share?
● Encouragement to share in-house content
● Cross-promotion of sister publications
● Prohibition on sharing competitors’ content?
● Repositioning of the journalist as news curator?
“there aren’t rules against it, … so why not let people know what else is
going on in the world? It’s not a bad thing or something that hurts me as a
reporter. If anything, it lets my readers know that I actually care enough to
put good news ahead of my own ego.”
— anonymous informant qtd. in Molyneux and Holton (2015: 234)

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Empirical Research
● Two key questions:
● What do journalists actually share?
● How do audiences respond to their sharing?
● Data selection:
● Tweeting members of the Australian Federal Press Gallery
● Tweeting members of the German Bundespressekonferenz
● No analysis of activities by institutional news outlet accounts
● Day-to-day tweets from Q2/2017 (outside of major elections etc.)
● Any URLs in these tweets, excluding links to twitter.com itself

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Dataset
● Australia:
● Early, advanced social media adoption (journalists and audiences)
● 171 of 303 Press Gallery members on Twitter (56%)
● 71 with ≥ two tweets per day on average
● Producing 91% of all Press Gallery tweets
● Germany:
● Slower, reluctant social media adoption (journalists and audiences)
● 523 of 825 Bundespressekonferenz members on Twitter (63%)
● 57 with ≥ two tweets per day on average
● Producing 78% of all Bundespressekonferenz tweets

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Analysis
● Outlet-level analysis:
● Journalists at each news outlet treated as one group
● Australia: Fairfax (SMH, The Age,...) and NewsCorp (news.com.au,
The Australian, Courier-Mail, …) treated as single outlets
● Germany: online/offline (Spiegel, Spiegel Online) treated as single
outlets
● Domain diversity ratio:
● Calculated per news outlet, for all of its journalists:
# 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑑
# 𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑈𝑅𝐿 𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑡𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑑
● Normalised ratio from ~0 (all URLs from one domain) to 1 (all URLs
from different domains)

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Australia

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Germany

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Observations
● Australia:
● More limited domain diversity
● Especially at more recent entrants (Guardian, Huffington Post)
● Stricter top-down guidelines?
● Greater competition in a limited market?
● More importance placed on social media activities?
● Focus on a more general audience?
● Germany:
● Greater domain diversity
● Looser social media guidelines?
● Less aggressive competition between outlets?
● Less overall concern about journalists social media activities?
● Focus on a more elite audience?

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Further Outlook
● Part of a larger research project
● Further social media analysis:
● Audience responses to different sharing strategies
● Analysis of sharing activity during breaking news moments
● Comparison with engagement patterns between journalists
● Comparison with UK news sharing patterns
● Activities by journalists beyond the Press Gallery /
Bundespressekonferenz
● Connection with other analyses:
● In-depth interviews with selected journalists (AUS, GER, UK)
● Correlation with outlet types and news coverage approaches

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Social Media & Society, Copenhagen, 20 July 2018
@snurb_dot_info / @nuernbergk / @aljoshakarim
Acknowledgment
This research is supported by the Australian Research Council
Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis: Emerging Forms,
Practices, and Uses.
Reference
Molyneux, Logan, and Avery Holton. 2015. “Branding (Health)
Journalism: Perceptions, Practices, and Emerging Norms.”
Digital Journalism 3 (2): 225–42. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.
906927.