Tow Center for Digital Journalism
A Tow/Knight Report
WHO
RETWEETS
WHOM?
HOW DIGITAL
AND LEGACY
JOURNALISTS
INTERACT ON
TWITTER
MICHAEL L.
BARTHEL
RUTH
MOON
WILLIAM
MARI
Funded by The Tow Foundation
and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Series Editor: Philip N. Howard
Michael L. Barthel, Ruth Moon, and William Mari. (2015). Who Retweets
Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter. Tow Center
for Digital Journalism. Tow/Knight Report 030520151. 21 pp. New York, New
York.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non
Commercial - Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Table of Contents
Introduction
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Collaboration and Tribalism in Journalism .
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Technology and News Work
The Changing News Environment
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Twitter Analysis
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Who Retweets Whom?
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Digital Journalists May Be Forming Their Own Circles of Attention
Endnotes
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13
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21
The Tow Center posted this paper on March 5th 2015, since then, we have found a need to address
questions about the conclusions, methodology and discussion, which were exacerbated by some factual
errors (that have now been transparently corrected).
The Tow Center publishes work in a number of different forms from different types of researchers;
working journalists as well as academics. This introduces a diversity of subject matters, of research
approaches, and of norms. This piece presented preliminary research, as part of a series on social media,
journalism and citizenship organized by Professor Phil Howard and a team of researchers at the
University of Washington. The text of the study said that the results were preliminary, that the sample
size was relatively small (750 tweets from 15 selected journalists) and collected on a single night in
October 2013.
In the paper, the authors Michael Barthel, Ruth Moon and William Mari explained the process of
going from research questions to a pilot study:
"To start answering these questions, we undertook a preliminary analysis of the Twitter use of
journalists from these three types of organizations. Our analysis is based on a human examination
of a moderate number of tweets as opposed to a computational analysis of a large data set. We
favored the deeper holistic view this manual approach brings over a wider automated process.
Later studies may be able to convert our process into an algorithmic approach and examine a
bigger set of data."
In many examples of preliminary research, sample sizes are small, and conclusions may be contested.
Professor Howard continues:
But research often involves purposefully sampling from evidence so as to develop some
hypotheses. The findings from this preliminary analysis can now become the testable hypotheses
behind further qualitative, comparative, or quantitative research. It is difficult to generate new
knowledge without working hypotheses, because these are needed before anyone else can confirm,
modify, or reject what has been revealed here.
The Tow Center always welcomes feedback, positive and negative, on every piece of work we publish, as
it helps us refine our research and be of more use to the journalist community.
Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
Corrections
We have made a number of corrections to this paper. 0OQBHFQBSBHSBQIUIFJODPSSFDUOBNF
TQFMMJOH/JDPMBT$POGFTTPSFIBTCFFOSFQMBDFEXJUI/JDIPMBT$POGFTTPSF.
Also on page 11, paragraph 1, the paper said "the five Times reporters admitted to our sample were
Jonathan Martin (a different Jonathan Martin works for Politico)". That was incorrect. Jonathan
Martin moved from Politico to The New York Times. The words "(a different Jonathan Martin
works for Politico)" have been removed.
On page 14, paragraph 1, the paper had "the Times’ most-followed political reporter, Jonathan
Martin of Fox News", which seemed to say that Mr Martin worked both for the Times and Fox News.
Mr Martin did not work for Fox. The words "of Fox News" have been removed.
On page 11, paragraph 1, the words "The five Times reporters admitted to our sample" have been
replaced with "The five Times journalists admitted to our sample" to reflect that some held more
senior roles than reporters.
On page 11, paragraph 3, the words "We consulted the Politico masthead for a list of its reporters"
have been replaced with "We consulted the Politico masthead for a list of its editorial staff" to reflect
the fact that it included editors and other senior editorial staff.
Introduction
Since bloggers and citizen journalists became a fixture of the U.S. media
environment, they have found themselves in conflict with traditional journalists. At first, bloggers initiated this conflict, establishing themselves in
opposition to the mainstream media, which—in their depiction—was poisoning American politics. But as citizen contributors and bloggers began to
break stories online and attract sizeable audiences, traditional print journalists had their own critique of them: as unprofessional, unethical, and overly
dependent on the very mainstream media they criticized. In a 2013 poll of
journalists, 51 percent agreed that citizen journalism is not real journalism.1
Such conflict is hardly novel within journalism as a professional realm.
Throughout the history of news work, the emergence of any significant new
journalistic role has resulted in conflict between the old guard and practitioners of the new style. TV news was regarded as a lesser medium than
print journalism; its visual emphasis made it seem less substantial than the
printed word,2 and its journalists were, consequently, afforded less prestige by their colleagues in print. This lesser status persisted, arguably, until
online journalism came along to replace TV news as journalism’s bête noire
(or, perhaps, enfant terrible).
1
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
But competition is not the only way journalists interact. Media organizations have long collaborated on newsgathering and news production activities. Outlets rely on wire services’ news articles to supplement their own
original reporting, or even run wire stories with little alteration. As seen in
such classic studies of news production as Michael Schudson’s Discovering
the News (1978), the institutional nature of journalism seems to require a
certain amount of collaboration. Journalists, even while competing, have
always needed each other, if only to corroborate what is important
enough to be labeled news.
The digital environment would seem to offer exciting new opportunities for
both competition and collaboration. Twitter, in particular, has served as a
platform for journalists to gain visibility, credibility, and prestige independent of existing organizations, as well as to collaborate in newsgathering
and production. Twitter provides new affordances and constraints that govern different patterns of interaction than seen in print journalism.3 Twitter
abounds with examples of reporters publicizing their newsgathering in real
time, showing not only what information they consider important, but also
where the information comes from.
Digital journalists in particular might be expected to thrive in a professional
environment where first-line newsgathering and news distribution occurs,
in whole or in part, online. But these longstanding divisions between traditional and digital journalists seem to persist. Research has found that while
digital journalists link to both online and traditional content, those from
traditional news organizations tend to limit their links to stories from other
traditional news organizations.4 Is this pattern replicated on Twitter? Do
digital and traditional journalists mainly retweet information from their
own parts of the media landscape? If we see robust connections between
traditional and digital journalists, we could conclude that Twitter has helped
to lower professional barriers and has opened up traditional journalists to
the validity of their online colleagues’ work. But if we see few connections,
it would indicate that differences in prestige and awareness persist, even as
the barriers to the free flow of information have been reduced.
2
Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
Collaboration and Tribalism in Journalism
While the popular image of journalists, especially as seen in films, is one of
rugged individualists,5 the reality is much more cooperative. While journalists often compete directly and aggressively with one another, working
on deadline to scoop rivals or to get details their counterparts missed,
news workers from different organizations have also historically shared
information, even working together on the same story. Within a given
news organization, especially one structured around collaborative newsrooms, journalists have enthusiastically embraced the notion of sharing
tasks and sources.6
But they have also embraced a persistent tribalism—tending to associate
more readily with fellow journalists who write or produce material for the
same medium (print with print, TV and radio with other TV and radio
reporters, and now digital with digital-based news workers). On some level
these internal communities of labor within journalism have existed since
its inception. Even within the same medium, reporters writing for different
audiences, from blue collar populists to white-collar elites, have typically
been most comfortable collaborating within their own sub-sets.
Collaboration, then, is bound by differences among journalists, and always
has been. In her classic newsroom ethnography, sociologist Gaye Tuchman
described how individual reporters, even those from rival organizations,
exercised their autonomy in an ecosystem of collegial relationships.7 One of
the ways they marked this space was through the act of sharing information
with one another. But there were parameters to this process: Readily avail-
3
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
able information was freely exchanged, and privately developed information
was rarely shared.8 The development of a positive professional reputation,
and accompanying occupational mobility, went hand in hand with a willingness to judiciously share facts with rivals. Herbert Gans, in his ethnographic
study of newsrooms during the same time period (the 1970s), found similar
processes of shared news production and the formation of journalistic values at work. He observed that journalists used each other as sources, both
for ideas and as measures of what was important, within and without their
own news organizations.9
This deeply ingrained practice of cautious collaboration, hedged as it is by
journalists’ tendency to associate with news workers of similar specializations and audiences, continues into the 21st century.
4
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Technology and News Work
Technology has radically changed how news is gathered, produced, and disseminated, but news workers still turn to one another for inspiration and
support, even as they tend to cluster more with journalists who are like
themselves. This is not so much a paradox as simply a continuation: The
Internet has only accelerated and enhanced habits that date to the origins
of journalism in the U.S.
One of the biggest changes in journalism in recent years has been the mergence of the social networking and microblogging platform Twitter as a
means for gathering, distributing, and discussing news. As a relatively new
technology, Twitter serves as an experimental playground for journalists
trying to engage with readers and other journalists in ways not possible a
decade ago.
Early research into journalistic use of Twitter has examined the platform as
an efficient distribution tool, as an aggregation and reporting tool and as a
marketing, researching and fact-checking tool.10 However, most research
has focused on the interactions between journalists and consumers, as
opposed to the study of inter-journalist tweeting.
There is some evidence that journalists embrace inertia, in spite of the
enticements of new technology, and many newsrooms treat the Internet and
its interactivity, in particular, as a problem to navigate rather than an opportunity for change.11 However, many journalists embrace the affordances of
the new medium. These journalists are likely to express opinions on Twitter,
pursue transparency by noting personal information, engage in discussions,
5
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
and relinquish their gatekeeping role by linking to external news sites—all
atypical behaviors in traditional newsrooms.12 A general shift from a physical-industrial mindset to a virtual, post-industrial mindset is pushing journalists, even the reluctant ones, to embrace participatory and collaborative
journalism in ways newly made possible by network technology.13
Past research shows that journalists engage with social media differently
depending on how they perceive their own role in the media ecology; elites
are more likely to hold to traditional news work standards, while non-elites
at smaller news organizations are more likely to relinquish gatekeeping
roles and pursue collaborative journalism, reported Lasorsa and his colleagues.14 Following this finding, one question this project seeks to answer
is whether there is a divide in online behavior between different types of
news organizations.
6
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The Changing News Environment
But how to delimit those different types of news organizations? While Twitter has been changing journalism, technological and economic shifts have
been changing the media environment in which news work occurs, blurring the boundaries of existing divisions between “digital” and “traditional.”
Although digital technologies are allowing these categories to collapse,
at the moment we still observe distinctiveness. It is therefore practical to
use the classification scheme developed by Gilad Lotan and colleagues to
analyze tweeting patterns during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. They differentiated between “mainstream news organizations,” which
publish both online and through traditional forms, and “new media organizations,” which publish solely online.15 We will use this straightforward
differentiation in deciding whom to study. But with an additional category;
the “hybrid organization” – primarily digital but with much smaller analogue channels. We defined these organizations as any whose online audience (defined as Twitter followers or website visitors) exceeded their print
circulation or broadcast audience by a factor of nine or more.
This slow convergence of the online and offline media spheres is particularly
notable given that these two professional realms have been roundly separate in the past, with the mainstream media (unsurprisingly) in the superior
position. A 2009 study by Sharon Meraz found that, while blogs frequently
linked to traditional media, mainstream outlets did not reciprocate, linking mainly to one another. Similarly, the landmark 2009 study by Leskovec,
Backstrom, and Kleinberg found that online news sources tended to cover
stories later (albeit only slightly later) than did mainstream media outlets.16
7
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
At issue here would seem to primarily be considerations of organizational
and occupational prestige. Since its inception, online journalism has been
derided as a lower form of work than traditional journalism. For evidence,
we need only look at the depiction of bloggers in popular culture, where
they are portrayed as dishonest, self-interested, self-aggrandizing gossipmongers—or in the press itself, where articles about the dangers of opinionated bloggers have been a standard since the form’s emergence. It is
not surprising that traditional media organizations, already under assault
from declining audiences and revenues, would seek to wall off what Gawker
founder Nick Denton has sarcastically called “barbarians”17 to preserve
the major advantage mainstream news outlets still have over their online
competitors—prestige.
What remains unclear is the impact on Twitter on this relationship. Have
the events of the last several years served to bring mainstream and digital journalists closer together, as decreased boundaries between these two
realms and increasing professional crossover have made them less functionally separable? Or have they been driven farther apart, as online journalists
seek to establish their own professional identity with qualities and prestige
distinct from traditional journalism?
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Twitter Analysis
To start answering these questions, we undertook a preliminary analysis of
the Twitter use of journalists from these three types of organizations. As we
were interested in the interactions between journalists at different organizations, we examined retweeting behavior.
Our analysis is based on a human examination of a moderate number
of tweets as opposed to a computational analysis of a large data set. We
favored the deeper holistic view this manual approach brings over a wider
automated process. Later studies may be able to convert our process into an
algorithmic approach and examine a bigger set of data.
At each organization, we identified the five political journalists whose Twitter accounts had the highest number of followers, and analyzed 50 retweets
from each. While non-politics journalists are sometimes the most followed
writers at certain publications (such as New York Times technology reporter
David Pogue), given that the bulk of our interest here was in so-called “hard”
news, we limited our analysis to political journalists. After selecting a traditional, new, and hybrid media organization (see below), we collected a total
of 750 retweets.
After visiting each journalist’s Twitter page and loading past tweets until 50
retweets were visible, we saved the results as a PDF file, which preserved an
archive of the tweets in the context they originally appeared rather than as
abstracted data on a spreadsheet—while still allowing researchers to click
on links and easily access Twitter bios. The tweets were downloaded on a
Saturday (October 19, 2013) in order to avoid the cascade effect of a week-
9
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
day’s major news event and reasonably mimic “normal” Twitter activity. In
our analysis, we found that our sample of tweets included one major news
event (the end of the October 2013 shutdown of the federal government),
but as major news events such as this occur with some regularity this further enhanced the normalcy of our selection. The tweets were analyzed
within two weeks of the data being downloaded, ensuring that our use of
real-time data was likely to mimic what was online when the tweet was
originally posted.
For each tweet, we recorded several qualities. First, we copied the URL of
the tweet; if the tweet was a so-called “manual” retweet (i.e., appeared as
“RT @ [tweet]” rather than a direct representation of the original tweet
with “Retweeted by [journalist]” at the bottom of the tweet) we attempted
to base our analysis on the original tweet as sent by the account being
retweeted. We then recorded the identity of the account being retweeted.
This identity fell into one of six categories: traditional, hybrid, or digital
news organization; or traditional, hybrid, or digital journalist, which we
classified as individuals who self-identified as employees of an organization with the organization’s category serving as the deciding factor for
the journalist. For those who did not work for a media organization, we
used “other.” Thus, a Washington Post employee would be classified as a
traditional media journalist, while a tweet from Salon’s Twitter account (@
Salon) would be classified as a new media organization. We also recorded
the number of retweets each tweet received, as well as whether the retweet
was by someone in the same organization to which the retweeter belonged.
In all cases, we used the Twitter account’s bio section as the final arbiter:
Whichever organization an individual identified as her primary employer
in the bio was used as her primary occupational identity.
For the traditional media organization, we selected the New York Times.
While there are well recognized problems with basing an analysis of U.S.
journalism off perhaps its least representative case, our interest here was
not in being representative, but in tracing the vanguard. As such, the Times
is widely seen as having a forward-thinking digital strategy for a tradi-
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Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
tional U.S. media organization.18 To determine which of its political reporters were the most followed on Twitter, we used the online tool Muckrack,
which aggregates the Twitter feeds of journalists by a number of categories,
including their employers. As noted above, the Times employees with the
most followers were rarely politics reporters; it was necessary to venture
23 slots down on Muckrack’s list—past bloggers, media critics, columnists,
and technology writers—before reaching a political reporter’s account.
The five Times journalists admitted to our sample were Jonathan Martin,
John Harwood, David Leonhardt, Nicholas Confessore, and Declan Walsh.
For a new media organization, we selected BuzzFeed. Since 2011, BuzzFeed
has built a sizable stable of political reporters, beginning with its hire of
blogging wunderkind Ben Smith from Politico. Since then, the site has
added a number of other well regarded reporters (like McKay Coppins, who
moved from Newsweek) as well as up-and-coming digital journalists (like
Rosie Gray). As its politics section lists only 11 staffers, we examined each
reporter’s Twitter account (listed, sometimes alongside their IM name or
even phone number, on the BuzzFeed Politics homepage) and identified the
five with the highest number of followers. These were Andrew Kaczynski,
McKay Coppins, Rosie Gray, Chris Geidner, and John Stanton.
Finally, for our hybrid media organization, we picked Politico. The outlet publishes a print product up to five times a week while Congress is in
session and once a week while it is in recess, distributing copies for free
in Washington and Manhattan. As such, its print circulation was around
40,000 as of 2012, while its organizational Twitter account (@Politico) is followed by over 600,000 users and its website receives over six million visitors
per month. We consulted the Politico masthead for a list of its editorial staff
and cross-referenced this with Twitter to find the five with the highest
number of followers. As a result, we examined the Twitter accounts of
Mike Allen, Blake Hounshell, Maggie Haberman, Alex Burns, and Dylan
Byers.
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Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
We should note, with regret, that only two of the reporters we examined
were woman. Additionally, no one in our sample appeared to identify as a
person of color, or at least did not do so in the public statements we observed.
We very much rue this paucity of underserved voices in our analysis, and
would only note that this mirrors the low number of female and minority
employees in newsrooms. That few members of these populations showed
up in our sample of the five most-followed journalists at three of the most
prominent media organizations in the United States primarily reflects a flaw
in hiring practices, rather than our sampling method. These organizations
are not hiring or promoting women or people of color into the most visible positions, especially in the “prestige” realm of political reporting. (The
journalists from the New York Times included in our sample, for instance—
all male, all but one white—have fewer Twitter followers than a number of
colleagues who are female, gay, or Asian- or African-American, but these
journalists work in areas such as business, technology, health, fashion, or
for the New York Times Magazine.) As our concern here is with the nature
of journalism as a practice, we must regrettably reflect the primarily white
and male nature of news work in the present cultural and historical context.
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Who Retweets Whom?
The results of this preliminary analysis both confirmed and confounded our
expectations. As has been widely reported in the past, traditional journalists’
online interactions primarily focus on others from their professional sector.
Times journalists retweeted traditional media organizations and journalists
63 percent of the time, while retweeting digital journalists and organizations in only 10 percent of cases, and hybrid in 8 percent. Reading through
these traditional journalists’ tweets felt a little like listening in on newsroom
chatter—reporters kibitzed about sports, complimented one another’s work
(almost everyone retweeted a laudatory Times review of a colleague’s book
about the George W. Bush administration), and traded commentary about
political events. While there was certainly some reaching across publications,
this was limited to places like the Washington Post or ABC News. It would
appear, then, that for traditional political journalists, little has changed: they
are primarily interested only in other high-prestige, traditional reporters.
Table 1: Whom journalists from traditional, hybrid, and digital media organizations retweet
Type of Journalist
Type of journalist/
organization being retweeted
Traditional
Hybrid
Traditional
Hybrid
Digital
Overall
63%
40%
32%
45%
8
19
6
11
Digital
10
24
45
26
Other
19
16
16
17
Note: Both traditional journalists and digital journalists mostly retweet journalists from their own sector, while hybrid journalists retweet journalists
from other sectors. Traditional journalists retweeted other traditional journalists in 63% of cases, and 45% of digital journalists’ retweets were of
other digital journalists. Only 19% of hybrid journalists’ retweets were of other hybrid journalists. Figures may not add to 100% due to rounding.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the Twitter accounts of 15 journalists observed on October 19, 2013.
13
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
This was manifestly not the case, however, for digital journalists. In the past,
digital journalists primarily took their cues from the mainstream media.
In our data, however, the trend has reversed. Digital journalists most frequently retweeted other digital journalists, and while they did so at a lower
rate than traditional journalists retweeted one another (45 percent versus 63
percent for traditional), this still represents a marked turnaround from previous trends. BuzzFeed reporters retweeted mainstream journalists around
a third of the time, and hybrid only 6 percent, an indication, perhaps, that
there was an interest in keeping the energy within their own sector. The
talk here felt considerably more focused than it did for the Times reporters:
While there was still a decent amount of cross-talk (jokes about pictures of
coworker McKay Coppins, for instance, were frequently retweeted), even
the casual talk seemed more angled toward creating a consistent image than
gratifying their own needs. Compare, for instance, this retweet from the
Times’ most-followed political reporter, Jonathan Martin, of Weekly
Standard reporter Stephen Hayes:
To this retweet by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski:
Martin’s tweet is a chummy, old-boys-club sort of socialization across media
organizations, suggesting an image of himself and his fellow reporters as still
grounded in a populist American culture (the Midwest, football, drinking)
while traveling the world, reinforcing the mid-century ideal of journalists as
blue-collar intellectuals. Kaczynski’s tweet, on the other hand, makes a joke
grounded in Web (and youth) culture (“YOLO”) while retweeting his own
organization. It sends the message that a tweet about an Internet service
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Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
provider from BuzzFeed’s own account is of interest to followers of political
news, and that being on the Internet both in the literal and cultural sense is
vital to BuzzFeed’s brand of political reporting. Where Martin’s reinforces
the old, Kaczynski’s is intensely insular, insisting on a new idea of what good
political reporting consists of: not being in Greece, but being online.
What emerges is a portrait of a professional sector trying assiduously to
assert itself and its particular set of values and norms. For those who get
their news online, to follow BuzzFeed reporters is to see a world where digital journalism is the primary source of information. And to be a news worker
on Twitter and follow BuzzFeed reporters is to see a professional domain
where digital journalists collaborate, interact, and praise one another—when
they’re not engaging in robust professional feuds. The virtual newsroom
depicted through digital journalists’ retweets is populated by very different
people than the one depicted by Times political reporters’ feeds.
Figure 1: Percentage of journalists’ retweets that are of journalists from their own sector,
journalists from other sectors, and non-journalists
Same type of journalist
63
Traditional
Hybrid
Digital
Other type of journalist
19
Non-journalist
18
64
45
19
16
38
16
Note: Both traditional journalists and digital journalists mostly retweet journalists from their own sector, while hybrid journalists retweet journalists
from other sectors. Traditional journalists retweeted other traditional journalists in 63% of cases, and 45% of digital journalists’ retweets were of
other digital journalists. Only 19% of hybrid journalists’ retweets were of other hybrid journalists. Figures may not add to 100% due to rounding.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the Twitter accounts of 15 journalists observed on October 19, 2013.
15
Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
This is reinforced by our analysis of how many retweets went to members
of the same organization. While traditional journalists primarily retweeted
other traditional journalists, they were the least likely to retweet those in
their own organization: Only 21 percent of their retweets of journalists or
news organizations (i.e., all but “other”) went to fellow Times reporters,
or the Times itself. For digital journalists, however, over a third of their
retweets of news workers or organizations went to fellow BuzzFeed employees. As a traffic-generating strategy, this is a bad idea: Retweets of coworkers
received, on average, 18 retweets total, while those of other organizations
received 45 total retweets, on average. But as a strategy to simultaneously
build professional and organizational prestige, it seems to have merit.
Table 2: How often journalists retweet accounts associated with the organization at which they work
Type of Journalist
Being retweeted
Same Organization
Different Organization
Traditional
Hybrid
Digital
Overall
21%
25%
36%
23%
79
75
64
77
Note: Columns show digital journalists are more likely than other types of journalists to retweet members of their own media organization. While
21% of traditional journalists’ retweets were of their co-workers, this was true of 36% of digital journalists’ retweets. Figures may not add to 100%
due to rounding.
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the Twitter accounts of 15 journalists observed on October 19, 2013.
Hybrid journalists displayed a pattern that would seem to justify the hybrid
appellation. They retweeted traditional journalists and organizations more
than digital journalists did and less than traditional journalists did (43 percent), and vice versa for digital journalists and organizations (24 percent).
They sat between the existing and emerging professional sectors and, as it
were, bridged the gap. They do not seem tremendously interested in growing the prestige of their own sector, however: While hybrid journalists
retweeted hybrid journalists and organizations more than any other journalists did (19 percent), this was still far less than other journalists’ attention to their own sectors (63 percent for traditional, 45 percent for digital).
16
Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
In part, of course, this is because there are relatively fewer hybrid media
organizations to retweet. But it makes sense with our understanding of this
emerging media model. Their interest is not in forging something new, but
borrowing the economic advantages of digital media while maintaining the
status of traditional media.
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Who Retweets Whom? How Digital and Legacy Journalists Interact on Twitter
Digital Journalists May Be Forming
Their Own Circles of Attention
Our findings suggest that digital journalism, as a professional realm, may
have entered a new phase. Previous work concluded that digital work was
dependent on broadcast and print journalism for everything from content
to career advancement. In our preliminary analysis of digital news workers’ Twitter activity, however, we saw two clearly separate realms emerge.
No longer are digital journalists trailing behind mainstream news outlets’
stories or looking to prestigious journalists for leadership. Instead, sites like
BuzzFeed have formed their own separate professional network, albeit one
that also incorporates selected mainstream journalists with strong online
presences, especially bloggers at outlets like the Washington Post, New York
Times, and ABC News. At the same time, however, traditional journalists
have not gone very far in embracing the new wave of online journalists, preferring primarily to interact with others in their sector. While digital journalism is undoubtedly innovating, those innovations are, for the journalists
we observed, staying mainly within the digital sector.
What stands to bridge the gap between these two sectors are a group of publications we call hybrid media organizations. Outfits such as Politico publish
a small-circulation print product but have an online audience nine or more
times higher than their offline audience. Journalists at these organizations
behave as if they have one foot in the traditional sector and one foot in digital
journalism, retweeting journalists from other sectors more so than they do
their own. As more media companies move into this realm, it may prove to
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Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
be an important area of innovation. Yet our findings suggest less change than
evolution: Hybrid organizations’ journalists, despite their larger online presence, still pay more attention to traditional than digital publications.
Indeed, despite the heartening finding that digital journalists have become
more independent, our reporting suggests other ways in which the promise of online journalism is not being fulfilled. Some have suggested that
digital journalism represents not just an alternative to traditional journalism, but a fundamental challenge, one toward which traditional journalism
must adapt. We see little evidence that this is occurring. While traditional
media companies are incorporating online ventures into their portfolios,
these seem to remain walled off from the professional environment of traditional reporters. Instead, they use Twitter in much the same way as other
journalists do: to publicize the stories of their colleagues and comment
on what others have said. And despite the robust history of collaboration
in journalism, little of this seems to be occurring on Twitter, at least not
through retweets.
Nevertheless, the overall picture that emerges from our research is a positive one. The history of journalism shows that establishing any area as a
separate professional domain has been difficult. If digital journalists have
managed to do so only two decades after the form came into existence, this
is no small achievement. While vanguard practitioners will undoubtedly
continue to make innovations, the question of whether digital journalism
can be self-sufficient no longer seems to be up in the air.
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Columbia Journalism School | TOW CENTER FOR DIGITAL JOURNALISM
Endnotes
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Oriella, “The New Normal for News: Have Global Media Changed Forever?” 2013,
www.oriellaprnetwork.com/sites/default/files/research/Brands2Life_ODJS_v4.pdf.
Doris Graber, “Seeing is Remembering: How Visuals Contribute to Learning from Television News,
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D. L. Lasorsa, et al., “Normalizing Twitter: Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communication
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Sharon, Meraz,“Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting
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Matthew C. Ehrlich, Journalism in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, “U.S. Newspaper Types, the Newsroom, and the Division
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Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 74.
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Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News,
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Nic Newman, “The Rise of Social Media and its Impact on Mainstream Journalism,” Working paper,
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John Pavlik, “The Impact of Technology on Journalism,” Journalism Studies, 1(2), 2000, 229–237.
D. L. Lasorsa, S.C. Lewis, and A. Holton, “Normalizing Twitter: Journalism Practice in an
Emerging Communication Space,” Journalism Studies, 13(1), 2012, 19–36.
Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, and danah boyd,
“The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian
Revolutons,” International Journal of Communication, 5, 2011, 1375-1405.
Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the
News Cycle,” Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge
Discovery and Data Mining, 2009, 497-506.
Ben McGrath, “Search and Destroy: Nick Denton’s Blog Empire,” The New Yorker, 18 Oct. 2010,
50–61.
Joshua Benton, “The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of
this media age,” Nieman Journalism Lab, May 15, 2014, www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leakednew-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/.
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